Stephen O’ Malley is above all an exceptional artist,  
who has an approach to music that I would qualify as artistic.
He envisions sound as a kind of matter to be worked on in a studio.
It is performative but also sculptural,
so there is a physical dimension to the production of his sound.
It is primarily a workshop destined for the students of the college of fine arts in Paris. 
Stephen O’ Malley will work with the students on the basis of sonic research,
in order to see what they will produce.
They are all studying visual arts and are made up of video artists, painters, 
sculptors and photographers
but they all share an affinity with sound, which is why they were selected. 
The idea is to unite all these personalities,
all these different universes around the work of Stephen O’ Malley to produce a performance.
There is a great tradition of art school rock and roll bands. 
I am thinking of Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Devo.
Most of the groups that are really great,
really substantial or brought something significant to the history of rock or Pop…
They all came from art school in fact.
Evidently the school is opening up, unreservedly, to new experimentations in a terrain that sometimes,
our students know better than their professors. 
And it’s essential for us to hold on to both ends of the chain.
The school needs to preserve studies that may be qualified as academic 
at the same time as opening up to very different and experimental work.
I have been teaching the history of art for 20 years at the school and I am 63 years old.
So as you can imagine, my contemporary music culture is not necessarily up to date.
So I simply pronounced the name of Stephen O’ Malley to a number of my students
and my children who have the same age as a number of my students.
And the reply was, “Holy Cow”.
So I said to myself, it must be a good idea.
When I discovered Stephen’s music at first, it felt a bit unsettling. 
But in the end, that’s all you ask of music, don’t you : to be unsettled, always.
I don’t know what shape it will take in the work of the students here, 
how they’re going to blend Stephen’s teaching and artistic proposition with their own,
but in any case we’ve got to thank Red Bull and les Beaux-Arts for the opportunity. 
This shows in fact that the students were happy to participate.
Some even came from far away. 
The show was packed. 
So was the lecture.
