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We have talked a lot, cogitated, discussed, these last weeks about the musical genres, about the multiplication of the genres until the confusion, about the limits of the genre, and as David Christoffel reminds us in his Metaclassical program, DEGENER, "the range of the genres seems interminable". Is there a genre of genres or genres without genre? Nevertheless, these are trends that we find in our social lives as well as in our musical tastes.
In the opinion of Guillaume Kosmicki
Anthony Laguerre's latest recording project with G.W. Sok invited me to present a slightly offbeat playlist, in the form of a question. What is this "creative music" that a whole group of musicians claim to be, and that we here at Hémisphère son claim to be? What is the mysterious common factor, the secret alchemy, or the ultra-secret code that unites all the music presented on this site? We, the editors gathered here, are hard pressed to define them clearly - and that's normal! What is the limit between "creation" (in bulk: research, experimentation, innovation, opening of new ways, invention of new languages, new gestures), and comfortable belonging to a "musical family", supposedly identified, like jazz, rock, pop, etc., or to a "sub-category" also "family", punk, indus, art rock, or to a large and encompassing category where we can find a little bit of everything, "electronic music", "improvised music"...? Do we have to belong, or claim to belong, to a "family" that is a bit "elitist" to be part of this "creative music": learned music, experimental music, contemporary music, written music...? I am far from being sure. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I see only an individual answer to this fantasized unity of "creative music". An infinity of music has shaped my ear as it is today, between which I am hard pressed to draw a hierarchy or a classification. They have all contributed to my personal vision of what creative music, "my" creative music, can be. There are as many definitions as there are music lovers: beyond any attempt at categorization, a significant amount of personal emotion enters into the balance, a part of inexplicable that we call... life.
L&S : When The Vowells Falls (Sérotine Records and Tractor Notown - release September 2022)
The album When The Vowells Falls by L&S brings together the music of Anthony Laguerre and the lyrics of G.W. Sok. The former, drummer, sound engineer, and also bassist and guitarist on the record, is a talented jack-of-all-trades, known for his Myotis projects, his show designs and his improvised music practice. In this album, Anthony Laguerre composes everything, empirically, from numerous ideas that he has gathered over the last fifteen years, some of them, and he conceives a setting perfectly adjusted to the voice of G.W. Sok, a singer whose organ is recognizable among thousands, doubled with a poet of great sensitivity, who was for a long time the singer of the group The Ex. This album, in collaboration with the 50 musicians of the Gradus ad Musicam orchestra , that Laguerre directed for the occasion, sometimes takes on certain clichés, certainly, it takes us on territories already surveyed, all steeped in rock that it is. It is only to better open us in the same time on an unexplored imaginary and make us travel through an immense field of territories in fallow. This album is a creator of waking dreams. You just have to let yourself be taken, we don't ask anything else to the music!
John Zorn: Naked City (Elektra records
1990 is the year of the release of the eponymous album of the group Naked City, a baroque project created two years earlier by the genius John Zorn, surrounded by the most prominent jazz and experimental virtuoso musicians of the moment (still those clichés!), Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Fred Frith, Joey Baron and Yamatsuka Eye. In these dazzling compositions, sometimes lasting only a few seconds and changing style instantly with a breathtaking mastery, Zorn refuses nothing, country, blues, rock, indus, jazz, variety... Everything goes through, in an absolutely irresistible musical zapping: the soundtrack of the nascent decade, infused with television, CNN, MTV, violent images of the world, sitcoms and advertisements, seeing the live collapse of the former Eastern Bloc that had determined the conduct of world geopolitics for 45 years. The cover, with a morbid photograph taken by Weegee, a 1940s news photographer, and the inside pages of the booklet, illustrated by mangaka Suehiro Maruo, erotic, cruel and grotesque, announce the color. Alongside the outrageous sampling of rap, house music and nascent techno, Naked City perfectly embodied the zeitgeist of the end of the century.
Nina Hagen: Nina Hagen Band (CBS Records1978)
This is also what I felt, ten years earlier, with the exceptional talent of the singer Nina Hagen, through the two albums recorded with the Nina Hagen Band(Nina Hagen Band, 1978, and Unbehagen, 1979): the decay of a Western society whose model begins its decline, and which does not realize it yet, the beginning of an unprecedented ecological crisis, the development of another economic crisis which will lead to the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact (Nina Hagen was born in the GDR), the end of an idea of modernity inherited from the Enlightenment, the faith in progress and the development of humanity. The music is able to say all this in filigree, without having to express it directly, in a sumptuous "No Future", a "joyful apocalypse" as one could say of a Vienna, then capital of a dying Empire at the beginning of the XXth century, radiating with its last sparkles. As virtuoso and inventive as her band is (and it is!), the presence of Nina Hagen's voice makes them disappear instantly by its capacity, its power, its madness and its aura. Nina Hagen is able to make us believe that rock has always been German.
Anne Montaron's discoveries
Joris Rühl, clarinet & the Umlaut Quartet : Calques, by Morton Feldman and Carl Naegelen (Umlaut Records- release May 2022).
The Umlaut collective is undoubtedly one of the most inventive and original of the French scene. It has its double in Germany (Berlin), it has its label, its festival, and its quartet. What a marvelous album Calques released on the Umlaut records label and which borrows its name from Karl Naegelen's composition for clarinet and quartet, recorded here in a sumptuous version!
By a game of mirrors - or calques - one finds associated with this recent creation of Naegelen, musician-member of Umlaut, the quintet for clarinet and quartet of the American Morton Feldman, and one understands why: the two works are two ways of considering the relation between the sound of the clarinet and the string quartet, of playing on the timbres and even more on the planes, the oppositions, or on the contrary the fusion of the instruments.
Fanny Vicens : Turn on, tune in, drop out - Works for accordion and electronics (Éole records - release November 2021)
Of this second solo album released five years after the first, Schrift (Stradivarius label), the accordionist herself says that it invites a psychedelic experience, no doubt because of the plane and iridescence games brought by electronics. Danger! This album is hypnotizing, to the point of being able to listen to it "in loop" without getting tired... We recognize in this album the know-how of the accordionist to build a program, to play on the complementarity of the atmospheres. Fanny Vicens never ceases to charm us, to bewitch us by her mastery and her musicality, her intelligence with the "text". Let yourself be carried away - as I was - by this psychedelic walk on the poetic lands ofAurélio Edler Copes, Pierre Jodlowski, Mayu Hirano, Carlos de Castellaranu, Jérôme Combier, Nuria Gimenez-Comas and ! Alexander Vert !
Duo Kristoff K.Roll and Jean-Michel Espitallier : World is a blues - Electroacoustic blues / Tribute to the exiles (MazetoSquare - release March 2022)
Because the universe of music often cultivates abstraction, or at least remains external to the life experiences of many humans, because we are devastated by our powerlessness in the face of the exiles who arrive every day in the four corners of the world, the book-disc of the sound art duo Kristoff K.Roll is essential! Essential as is the fresco by Georges Aperghis Migrants created last September at the Musica festival. To give a voice to the exiles, other than in a news flash or numbers. To turn their words into music, a poetic and polyglot creation. To give back to the uprooted their languages, their dreams, their fears, their humanity. This is what the Kristoff K.Roll are trying to do against a backdrop of blues, the music of those who found themselves on the road after the great Mississippi flood of 1927. A poetic, electroacoustic telescoping (the magic of sound weaving!) between the music of these bluesmen.women of yesteryear and the stories of today's exiles, captured by the microphones of the duo Kristoff K.Roll in the Jungle of Calais, counterpointed by the texts and the voice of Jean-Michel Espitalier, the whole bathed, literally plunged in the improvisations of some poets of the sound: Daunik Lazro, Patrice Soletti, Claire Bergerault, Christian Pruvost, Carole Rieussec...
And Suzanne Gervais' favorites
Kaija Saariaho: Laterna Magica ( Ondine Records2011)
The fantastic and the marvellous inspire the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho who delivers, in 2009, this Magic Lantern, a 20-minute symphonic page in the tradition of impressionist symphonic poems!
Debussy : Bruyères by Vikingur Olafsson at the piano (Deutsche Grammophon, 2020)
The beauty and emotion of this home-session recording add a touch of soul to this Debussian piece, taken from the second book of the famous preludes. What a way to rediscover this "softly expressive" piece with the appearance of a haiku.
Elżbieta Sikora: Cadenza for Alexis Descharmes on cello
The Polish composer Elżbieta Sikora, who lives in France, is the author of a rich and eclectic catalog: electronic music, several works of chamber music, pages for orchestra, for voice, as well as operas. This solo page explores the lyricism and the low register of the instrument.
DÉGENRER, Métaclassique program, to be heard on Hémisphère son
