The title of the piece is borrowed from Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad, where the words and the memory that contains them distort, filter, corroborate, and even construct each other, resulting in the observation that “conversation took place in a vacuum, as if the words meant nothing, as though they could have no meaning. A sentence would be suspended in space, frozen in its flight, and then could resume its journey there or elsewhere." All sonic materials are derived from a vibrato F above middle C played on the concert flute, which serves as the metaphor for couloirs, both for their resemblance as well as the fact that they are essentially filters—couloirs being the filter for the memory in the film and the flute being the filter of the air and musical note. The piece can be regarded as a process of excavating from the flute various words and voices that speak and sing incomprehensibly but are nevertheless full of expression.