MARC BARON + ERIC LA CASA "Contrefaçons"(CD by Swarming)

This is the first collaboration between Marc Baron and Eric La Casa, two leading figures in the French and international experimental sound scene. Baron is an electroacoustic composer and live performer, known for his unconventional approach to modified and manipulated playback devices; La Casa is a composer and field recordist, focused on attentive listening to urban and natural environments. The meeting, which brings their respective artistic practices into play, explores the concept of ‘counterfeiting’ as a tool to rethink the relationship between reality and its acoustic representation, while allowing the duo to reflect on their relationship with recording and the archive. In September 2023, inside the Hiventy studios in Joinville-le-Pont – a complex once known as Pathé – the two artists recorded the technical phases of film restoration, from the intervention on the image and soundtrack to the development procedures. Through the observation of mechanical and digital methodologies, and in dialogue with specialised technicians, La Casa and Baron explored the challenges, operational details, and artistic commitment that characterise the recovery of a filmic work. The question that emerges from their work is as simple as it is complex: how can a film be returned to its ‘original’ state? The answer reveals the problematic nature of this aspiration. What the two artists discover is that the very idea of ​​a fixed original is an illusion: every restoration attempt must confront the continuous evolution of our perceptual expectations. It is precisely in this tension between historical fidelity and contemporary expectations that the two experimenters find fertile ground for their investigation into forgery. Back in their studios in Montreuil, they have initiated what they call ‘destructive re-listening sessions’ – a process in which the original recordings are subjected to treatments that deliberately alter their integrity. Baron, with his experience in the manipulation of magnetic tapes and demagnetization processes, created situations of controlled instability, while La Casa documented these moments of transformation and sonic dissolution. The result is a work that questions the processes of conservation using them as raw material for a broader reflection on the ephemeral nature of representation. Contrefaçons thus becomes a sonic paradox: using destruction as a creative method, the two artists reveal how fragile and subjective any claim to authenticity is in the field of sound reproduction.
Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural magazine (Italy), December 2025, https://neural.it/2025/12/marc-baron-eric-la-casa-contrefacons/

Eric La Casa has an uncanny knack for collecting swatches of quotidian life and rearranging or altering them to produce new and interesting views. He visits and records ordinary places: a car park, a shipyard, his own apartment, and gives us detailed looks (listens?) at each, homing in on neglected or unheard sonic life.
Here, in collaboration with recordist Marc Baron, his attention is turned to the workings of a film restoration lab. We get deeply sensuous sounds of the machinery and its attendant workings, along with bits of dialogue and snippets of conversations. This practice, in this location, calls into question the various acts of archiving, and what we choose to archive, in a universe of never-ending Stuff. The duo is archiving the archiving, so to speak.
Lest you think that this practice can't possibly yield anything even remotely musical, I can assure you that is not the case. Passages of sound/silence have been carefully chosen and shored up against each other, layered with words/voices and collated in surprising sequences. Abrupt changes in the sound field sit alongside intimate listening to hum and scrape, very much in the manner of a good instrumental improvisation. Parts of it sound like a demonstration of the various filmic processes with accompanying explanations, and others are fly-on-the-wall captures of running reels and clashing film tins.
The whole is a brilliant example of what can be assembled from field recordings and tape processing, and it adds admirably to La Casa's growing body of work.
Jeph Jerman, SquidEar, december 2025, https://www.squidsear.com/cgi-bin/news/newsView.cgi?newsID=2957

Let’s say you have three copies of the same film, all from the same year, all with different flaws, distortions, color quality, even edits. Which is the original? How do you recreate what the director wanted the audience to see? This is the problem of film restoration, and it is what occupies the staff at Hiventy Laboratories in Joinville-le-pont, France. Marc Baron and Éric La Casa visited Hiventy to record this process, interviewing the restorers and documenting their machinery. In the words of interview subject Benjamin Alimi, “There is no absolute truth in film restoration anyway.” This is true of audio recording as well—there is no reality that is objectively represented on tape. In recognition of this, Baron and La Casa go about manipulating their recordings, playing with the spaces that the listener inhabits: Are we in Hiventy, or in Baron’s studio? Sometimes on Contrefaçons (or “counterfeits”), we hear the machinery and even the films that are being worked on, clear and unedited. Sometimes we’re whisked away to a purely abstract space. And sometimes, for strange and compelling stretches, we don’t know where we stand at all.
Matthew Blackwell, The Best Field Recordings on Bandcamp, May 2025, https://daily.bandcamp.com/best-field-recordings/the-best-field-recordings-on-bandcamp-may-2025