Floy Krouchi is a composer and performer from Paris. Exploring the bare bones of bass frequencies, the torpor of oscillations, a relationship to silence unfolds within Bass Holograms and takes the audience to the very edge of sound, inside time, into the swirls of an ‘electronic raga’. Rhythm, mass, fabric—from noise-based pulsation to amplified silence—each solo is a unique piece, recorded at a precise moment in time, numbered and dated like a painting or an artefact. Bass Holograms and its ‘electronic raga’ are the fruit of research Krouchi carried out in India on the art of ragas and microtones in Hindustani music with Pandit Hindraj Divekar, master of Rudra Veena.

Bass Holograms offers a research into the hybridisation of an electric instrument traditionally attributed to rock and pop music—the fretless bass. The hybrid Bass Krouchi developed, the Fkbass, incorporates elements of the Rudra Veena, one of the most ancient instruments of the classic musical tradition, the ancestor of the bass (same tuning, same number of strings) with the addition of the ‘chikaree’, the buzz—three resonant strings ushering in tonality—a drone. Floy Krouchi’s bass is transformed in real time using an MaxMSP patch developed with Vivien Trelcat. This patch notably includes FM synthesis, analogue modelling synthesis, resynthesis using iana—a series of complex modulations using ring modulation as a base, loops and temporal effects (delay with transposition and feedback as well as reverberation).

The idea behind these sonic holograms stems from the potential of granting the listener access to sonic deployment across the whole spectrum, a deployment generated exclusively by the instrument itself, using a simple bass signal, relatively basic as far as harmonics are concerned.

This performance happened at Adil Shah Palace on 16th December 2019 as a part of Sound interventions at Serendipity Art Festival 2019