In his album Breizhiselad, Eric Cordier has taken an old record that he disliked and shifted it onto tape, his usual medium for sound production. In doing so, Cordier portrays the dual role of the composer as both listener and creator. Viewed through this lens, the significance of his action is inescapable. Cordier begins with music that he opposes, and sorts through the sounds, treating them, in spite of our claims of sound’s immateriality, as very concrete materials with which to build his piece. Each sound takes up a length of tape. The tape, a simpler materialization of sound than the record from which Cordier took the sounds, is looped, reassembled, and manipulated to produce new music from the same sounds. Avant-garde music is prone to being understood as music that accepts, or, at the least, recognizes and is in dialogue with ideas of music’s failure to signify in the same sense as language. Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano seem to refuse, not only to be identified with a referent, but to be identified with the very instrument that produces them, when the instrument is the only referent by which one can objectively understand it. Generally, avant-garde music has followed firmly in that tradition of refusal. Cordier, too, damages the record in order to create his music. He insists on tearing and reassembling the sounds, thereby refusing to admit the physical referent that the instrument represents into his work. In his refusal of the traditional musical representation, however, might Cordier actually be moving closer to signification? If traditional music has failed to signify, despite attempts, like that of Debussy’s La Mer, to name a referent, the focus of tape artists like Cordier on the materiality of sound may be a move towards a form of signification unique to music. Cordier’s grainy tracks, like Cezanne’s flat paintings, refer back to their medium. Cordier is a musician as Cezanne was a painter, which means that he works with sound material, such as tape, just as Cezanne worked with paint. Music, more than other art forms, tends to lose its physical aspects. We do not see a painting without its paint, a text without its letters, but the physical form in which music is produced is rarely seen. Cordier, with other tape artists, refers us back to that, as a possible grounds for beginning to understand how music is capable of signification.