ARP TARK

For around ten years, Aymeric Hainaux from Toulouse has been performing beatbox. This simple discipline, which emerged from rap culture, entails making sounds with the mouth. Hainaux, alias ARP TARK, has followed a more unusual path and is not in the least hip-hop. When he beatboxes into a microphone, he uses more than just his breath. As he says himself, ‘we were given a body and a space to use it.’ During his performances, his musical approach remains totally focused on gesture and emotion. He doesn’t use loops, the action takes place entirely live. He sometimes uses an echo pedal or uses other instrumentalists or dancers. His music comes from inside and is imbued with urgency; the voice, silence, muscular tension and spurts celebrate the immediacy of the present moment.

Hainaux has performed at the Palais de Tokyo, the Fondation Cartier and the Villa Arson, among other places, as well as alternative spaces and squats, in Europe and abroad. He also runs the Isola Records label, bringing out discs in which he performs as a duo with his friend Stéphane Barascud under the name Cantenac Dagar. And twice a year, in Toulouse, he organises the À Bruits Secrets festival, featuring marginal hybrid forms of music at the frontiers of performance and concert. In parallel with his music, he draws and participates in AKROMA, a traveling exhibition featuring around one hundred European artists.