Chroniques du Bruit by Sarah Benhaïm

The project featured in this post can serve as an example of how your possibilities multiply when you are both a graphic and a type designer. Hélène Marian designed the book shown here and as well one of the typefaces used in it.

Chroniques du Bruit (“Chronicle of Noise”) is some sort of documentary of the Parisian scene for noise music and experimental composition in the years 2011 to 2012. It was compiled by author Sarah Benhaïm who herself witnessed the twenty-nine performances, took concert notes, listened to the audience, and chalked down details of the locations, the stage productions, and the gestures combined with the music. Benhaïm is a lecturer at the department for Cultural and Discursive Interactions (ICD) at the University of Tours, France. She specializes in popular music, noise music, and the DIY practices surrounding them.

It is at that point that Hélène Marian picked up with her concept for the graphic design. She starts on the cover with the lettering piece “Bruit” that shows distorted contours and is based on her typeface Brake. Brake is one half of a sans-serif duo, the other half being Starter. Influenced by the letterforms found on car license plates, they represent design alternatives that allow to consciously work on the length of a given line. In Chroniques du Bruit, Brake is used for the gig dates, the dialogues, and the index. Starter & Brake still await their release for the general public.

As a roman companion you see Cardinal, designed by the team of Production Type under the auspices of Jean-Baptiste Levée. The book typography uses Cardinal in three variants of the collection: Classic, Photo, and Fruit. In a DIY attitude that matches the topic, Marian made them all a little noisier: she beefed up the letterforms and drastically reduced the letterspacing and linespacing in all titles, to a point where it might hurt.

Chroniques du Bruit is completed by photographs that artist Steeve Bauras took at the musical events. It also includes a CD with an experimental sound piece by DJ Fusiller constructed from superpositions of recordings of noise music artists. Voilà what you could call a Gesamtkunstwerk.