En résidence au CNEI (Centre national édition art image), les deux artistes proposent une oeuvre sonore et plastique mêlant sons, images et textes. ©Electre 2024

A book and audio CD, Water Days documents an exchange of pictures, texts, sounds and voices between multimedia artist Leah Singer and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo. During their 2007 and 2008 residencies at the Centre national de l'édition et de l'art imprimé (Cneai) in Chatou, near Paris, Singer and Ranaldo created a body of printworks in the museum's etching atelier, as well as field recordings made in the studio, on the houseboat where they resided, and in the community at large.

Water Days began as two texts each inspired by the contrast between wanderlust and the desire for home. This book and CD represent a confluence of ideas, where time and place are not fixed. When invited to do a radio piece for Atelier de Création Radiophonique de France Culture (ACR) the sound recordings made in Chatou were combined with recordings of electric guitar, as well as pre-recorded voices including those of artist Robert Smithson and writer Carson McCullers.

Leah Singer is best known for live manipulated projections of her experimental films. Calling upon film as an active performance, Singer chooses to present her films live often in collaboration with musicians. Originally from Canada, Leah Singer works and lives in New York City.

Lee Ranaldo is a composer/performer, visual artist, writer, and founding member of the NewYork City group Sonic Youth, who continue to record new music and tour the world on a regular basis. Formed in 1981, the group's 17th album, The Eternal, was released by Matador Records in June 2009.

Leah Singer & Lee Ranaldo have done numerous collaborations including, in 2009, the audio/video installation lloveyoulhateyou at Magasin3 in Stockholm, and We'll Know Where When We Get There, the culminating exhibition of their combined efforts at CNEAI. A DVD/Book of their long standing film/music work DRIFT was published in 2006.

The ZagZig series at Dis Voir Editions was born in the wake of the Atelier de Création Radiophonique de France Culture, a laboratory for sound experimentation which confronts all types of artistic practice with writing for radio. The challenge of this new editorial space is, through an act of translation, to carry works beyond their broadcast to exist in the form of books/CDs that are designed with the artists in order to create true visual objects.

The sound piece Water Days (45') included on CD in the book was commissioned by the Atelier de Création Radiophonique (ACR)/ France Culture, with the support of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) and the Ministère de la Culture, as part of a public commission. It was broadcast on April 26th 2009. www.franceculture.com