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Here we go, we're here to stay!
To celebrate our first anniversary, with more than 17,000 readers, we are continuing our musical line of discoveries from all horizons.
What better way to highlight the creativity and uniqueness of these artists than with a playlist?
Tour de piste by Anne Montaron, Guillaume Kosmicki and Suzanne Gervais.
Anne Montaron's tour de piste
Tomoko Sauvage, guest of the Barbican sessions, 7 January 2022
The Japanese sound artist Tomoko Sauvage has toured the world with her ceramic bowls and hydrophones (microphones immersed in water, electroacoustic transducers). Here she dialogues with the sculptures and lighting fixtures of the Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi, whose retrospective is on show at the Barbican Center.
During her performance, she makes two of Noguchi's sculptures sound: "Tsukubai" (granite & water, 1964) & "Mountains Forming" (1982-83, galvanised steel). One cannot help but be struck by the musician's marvellous sense of space and the fluid and poetic interplay between sculptures, sound and space: a dance of sounds!
Gyorgy Ligeti, "Lamento from the Trio for horn, violin and piano", 1982
With Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano, Saschko Gawriloff, violin, Marie-Luise Neunecker, horn
On Thursday 10 March 2022 in Paris, while the Russian government is dropping bombs on the Ukraine, the marvellous soloists of the Court-Circuit ensemble perform a deeply moving version of this trio by Ligeti.
As the last movement of the piece, a Lamento of unbelievable expressive force, resounds under the vault of the Sorbonne chapel, images of this 21st century war emerge, with their cohort of lies, deaths, suffering and exiles.
It is as if Ligeti had wanted to set to music in the early 1980s the image of the void that swallows up human lives in any war.
An incredibly deep and pure page, in the form of a passacaglia, within which chromatic vines "weep and lament", as in a passion by JS Bach, cross each other.
Jonas Kocher and Luc Ferrari, "Perspectives and Echoes / Tautologos III", 2021
Ensemble -bRt- Label Bruit (Switzerland)
Face to face in this album proposed by the Swiss accordionist, improviser and composer Jonas Kocher, two types of collective process that reformulate the question of interpretation and collective improvisation, and render the distinction between the two processes obsolete.
"Jonas Kocher's" Perspectives and Echoes" (2019) takes as its starting point a graphic score by Jonas Kocher, with a temporal and spatial framework, within which the musicians of the ensemble -bRt- improvise.
"Tautologos iii by Luc Ferrari (1969) is a textual score: a set of explanations and instructions based on the idea of tautology. The instrumentation is free. The duration is also free. The interpretation is built on a preliminary collective discussion. Each participant chooses to play a cycle, which they repeat. Each cycle is composed of a sound action, then a silence longer than the action. The music generated (superposition of individual cycles) could last indefinitely...
Guillaume Kosmicki's tour
Melaine Dalibert, "Shimmering", released on 20 May 2022
From album to album, pianist Melaine Dalibert oscillates between rigorous algorithmic compositions and freer pieces tinged with minimalist romanticism, sonic pearls with a gentle melancholy, suspended in time, inciting ecstatic listening. This is the case with this new record, just released by Ici d'ailleurs, the first collaboration between the artist and the label. Throughout the tracks, the listener is constantly surprised by the resonance and filtering effects applied to the piano, the instrumental or electroacoustic complements, or even the appearance of a discreet beat . Everything is perfectly balanced, without any exaggeration, leaving the piano as master of ceremonies. Moreover, Melaine Dalibert has for me the rare talent of incorporating into his records compositions that remain forever linked to personal situations experienced at the time of listening, which are inscribed in memory like indelible memorial traces and generate the feeling of a precious intimacy with his music.
Iva Bittová, "River Of Milk", 1991
During my long techno years, when I was on the verge of musical exclusivity for the trance and decibel avalanches ofelectronic dance music, nourished by the strong emotions of rave parties and their thundering beats and by the libertarian ideal of sound-systems travellers, a few rare records still made me cling to more acoustic sound realities. River Of Milk byIva Bittová was one of them (1991, Eva records). This is her first solo album, originally recorded in 1990 in Czechoslovakia under her own name (Pavian Records). The playful assurance and emotional power of her voice and violin are in complete contrast to the apparent fragility of the band. To my mind, this record expresses what would be the quintessential music in its simplest form.
Plastikman, "Closer", 2003
Electronic music is precisely what we're talking about, with what has long been my favourite album: Closer (Novamute, 2003), the record by one of the greatest producers of the Detroit techno style, Plastikman (alias Richie Hawtin), even if he didn't reside in Detroit but in the neighbouring Canadian city of Toronto, and even if he had just moved to Berlin at the time of this opus' release. The irreproachable quality of the sound and the very fine work on the endless beat, made organic and often discreet (as on a previous album from 1998, Consumed ) bring these chiselled compositions, all unstoppable, closer to the work of American minimalist music. We are however well within the dance music culture with this record between two worlds. Another album, just as fascinating, addressed the same issues, which were then passionately debated between the two artists: Jeff Mills' soundtrack for Metropolis by Fritz Lang (Tresor, 2000).
Suzanne Gervais' tour of the ring Suzanne Gervais
Anna Meredith, "Nautilus", 2012
Moshi Moshi Records
What a spirited, wildly chaotic piece of work from Scottish composer Anna Meredith. A slap in the face! She made a name for herself composing classical music in the symphonic tradition - reminiscences of which can be heard in the electric fanfare of this haunting "Nautilus" - before reincarnating herself, time and again: first in her EP "Black Prince Fury", in 2012, then with her first album: Varmints, of which Nautilus is the opening track.
Caroline Shaw, "Partita for 8 voices : Passacaglia - Roomful of Teeth", 2013
New Amsterdam
The passacaglia, a famous dance in the 17th century, is here revisited by the American composer Caroline Shaw: eight voices a capella, with phrases that border on sighing, to the point of crying out : purity and sensuality all at once. A work full of surprises... and humor!
Philip Glass, "The American Four Seasons" - 4th movement, with Gidon Kremer and films by Jonas Mekas, 2015
Lyricism and theatricality characterise for me this concerto by the master of the American minimalist, Philip Glass. A mischievous and caustic nod to Vivaldi's hit.
