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The FRAC Champagne-Ardenne and the Contemporary Art Centre / Passages are offering a program of concerts and performative works in the art center’s premises, within an extremely unusual structure called Le Kiosque électronique. As a contemporary and nomadic version of the bandstand, this glass box has been designed by Olivier Vadrot & Cocktail Designers as a travelling platform for live concerts. Sound is only heard through headphones connected to the stand. Invariably contextual, each presentation of Le Kiosque électronique offers the public a chance to meet musicians and performers, which in turn creates a situation that is by turns poetic, funny and absurd. Le Kiosque électronique also gives rise to a visual experience for visitors who are not hooked up to this amplification system, the experience of the silent spectacle of the musicians’ interpretation and the range of behavior of audiences immersed in both individual and collective listening. This parallelepiped of glass and metal—which calls minimalist sculpture to mind—promises spectators and listeners alike a host of novel visual and acoustic experiences.

During and between the four evenings when Le Kiosque électronique will be in operation, the empty spaces of the art center will be successively filled by the broadcast of three sound pieces produced by the artists Guillaume Constantin, Pierre Paulin & Alexis Guillier, and Mungo Thomson. Echoing the ghostlike presence of the public outside the event, these pieces have been composed from a register of interstitial sounds, winks at live music, or recorded as with commercial sonic identifications, which here introduce a deliberately elongated expectation with a view to the following concert. Titled Day of Radiance, echoing the Laaraji Ambient 3 album produced by Brian Eno in 1980, and in response to the nighttime context of the three live sessions in Le  Kiosque électronique, this program has been devised by Anne-Lou Vicente and Raphaël Brunel, art critics and freelance exhibition curators who are running the curatorial platform What You See is What You Hear.