In les occupés, I wanted to create a sonic work that prioritized the voices of ‘the occupied,’ people in countries across the world who are standing up to autocratic government structures and anti-democratic practices. Rather than focus on a single country, or movement, I wanted to emphasize the grassroots nature of protest by including sonic elements like chants and raw audio from protests, and visual elements like self-recorded video posted to social media. My intention throughout les occupés is to universalize the experience of the occupied, but not to anonymize them—they have names, faces, families. My use of the title (meaning ‘the occupied’) attempts to fuse multiple definitions of the word. To be occupied means being possessed and controlled by a hostile force, but these protesters are also occupying: space, place, time, and attention- just by the very nature of their presence.
The high-pitched sound heard at the beginning of the piece is taken from a video in which an LRAD (long-range acoustic device), or sound cannon, was used on protesters recently in Serbia, and the frequency you hear (3.5 kHz) is in the exact frequency range (2kHz-4kHz) that these devices commonly emit, as it is the most damaging to humans. In order to emphasize the grassroots nature of ‘les occupés,’ all audio in the piece is sampled or manipulated from recorded video.