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Over the past few weeks, we've been talking about musical genres, about the multiplication of genres to the point of confusion, about the limits of genre, and as David Christoffel reminds us in his Métaclassique program, DÉGENRER, "the range of genres seems endless". Is there a genre of genres, or genres without genres? 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 prompted me to present a slightly offbeat playlist, in the form of a question. What, then, is this "creative music" to which a whole group of musicians lay claim, and which we here at Hémisphère son claim to be all about? What is the mysterious common factor, the secret alchemy, the ultra-secret code that unites all the music presented on this site? We, the editors gathered here, are at a loss to define them clearly - and understandably so! What's the boundary between "creation" (broadly defined as research, experimentation, innovation, opening up new avenues, inventing new languages and gestures), and comfortable belonging to a supposedly identified "musical family" such as jazz, rock, pop, etc., or to an equally "family-like" "sub-category" such as punk, indus, art rock, or to a broad, all-encompassing category where you can find a bit of everything: "electronic music", "improvised music"...? Do we necessarily have to belong, or claim to belong, to a somewhat "elitist" "family" in order to be part of this "creative music": learned music, experimental music, contemporary music, written music...? I'm far from sure. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I see only an individual response to this fantasized unity of "creative music". An infinite amount of music has shaped my ear as it is today, and I'm at a loss to draw a hierarchy or classification between them. 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 not inconsiderable amount of personal emotion comes into the equation, a part of the inexplicable that we call... life.
L&S: When The Vowells Falls (Sérotine Records and Tractor Notown - out September 2022)
L&S's album When The Vowells Falls 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 album, is a talented jack-of-all-trades, known for his Myotis projects, his show designs and his practice of improvised music. In this album, Anthony Laguerre composes everything, empirically, from the many ideas he has gathered over the last fifteen years, some of them, and he creates a setting perfectly suited to the voice of G.W. Sok, a singer whose organ is recognizable among a thousand, 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 , whom Laguerre directed for the occasion, is sometimes clichéd, admittedly, but it takes us into territory we've already explored, as rock-flavored as it is. But at the same time, it opens us up to an uncharted imaginary world, taking us on a journey through a vast field of uncharted territory. This album is a creator of daydreams. All you have to do is let yourself be taken in - that's all you need from music!
John Zorn: Naked City (Elektra records1990)
1990 saw the release of the eponymous album by the group Naked City, a baroque project created two years earlier by the brilliant John Zorn, surrounded by some of the hottest jazz and experimental virtuosos of the moment (those clichés again!): Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Fred Frith, Joey Baron and Yamatsuka Eye. In these dazzling compositions, sometimes lasting just a few seconds and changing style instantly with breathtaking mastery, Zorn denies himself nothing: country, blues, rock, indus, jazz, variety... Everything goes, in an absolutely irresistible musical zapping: the soundtrack of the new decade, infused with television, CNN, MTV, violent images of the world, sitcoms and commercials, seeing the live collapse of the former Eastern Bloc that had determined the conduct of world geopolitics for 45 years. The cover, featuring a morbid snapshot by 1940s news photographer Weegee, and the booklet's erotic, cruel and grotesque inner pages, illustrated by mangaka Suehiro Maruo, set the tone. Alongside the outrageous sampling of nascent rap, house and techno, Naked City perfectly embodied the zeitgeist of the fin de siècle.
Nina Hagen: Nina Hagen Band (CBS Records1978)
This is also what I felt, ten years earlier, with the exceptional talent of 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 is beginning to decline, and which doesn't yet realize it, the beginning of an unprecedented ecological crisis, the development of another economic crisis that 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, faith in progress and the development of humanity. The music is capable of saying all this in filigree, without having to express it directly, in a sumptuous "No Futur", a "joyful apocalypse" as one might have said of a Vienna, then capital of a fading Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, beaming with its last sparkles. As virtuosic and inventive as her band is (and they are!), the presence of Nina Hagen's voice makes them instantly disappear with its ability, power, madness and aura. Nina Hagen is capable of making 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 collectiveis undoubtedly one of the most inventive and original on the French scene. It has its double in Germany (Berlin), its own label, its own festival, and its own quartet. What a marvellous album Calques on the Umlaut records label, which takes its name from Karl Naegelen's composition for clarinet and quartet, recorded here in a sumptuous version!
This recent work by Naegelen, a musician and member of Umlaut, is mirrored by the quintet for clarinet and quartet by the American Morton Feldman, and it's easy to see why: the two works are two ways of looking at the relationship between the sound of the clarinet and that of the string quartet, of playing on timbres and even more so on planes, oppositions or, on the contrary, the fusion of instruments.
Fanny Vicens: Turn on, tune in, drop out - Works for accordion and electronics (Éole records - out 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 due to the iridescent and flat effects of the electronics. Danger! This album is hypnotising, to the point where you can listen to it "over and over" without tiring of it... This album shows the accordionist's skill in building a programme and playing on the complementarity of atmospheres. Fanny Vicens never ceases to charm and bewitch us with her mastery and musicality, her intelligence with the "text". Let yourself be carried away - as I was - by this psychedelic stroll through the poetic lands ofAurélio Edler Copes, Pierre Jodlowski, Mayu Hirano, Carlos de Castellaranu and Jérôme Combier, Nuria Gimenez-Comas and Alexander Vert !
Duo Kristoff K.Roll et Jean-Michel Espitallier : World is a blues - Blues électroacoustiques / Hommage aux exilés (MazetoSquare - release March 2022)
Because the world of music often cultivates abstraction, or at least remains external to the life experiences of so many human beings, and 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 by sound art duo Kristoff K.Roll is essential! As essential as Georges Aperghis' fresco Migrants , premiered last September at the Musica festival. Giving a voice to exiles, other than in news flashes or figures. Turn their words into music, a poetic, polyglot creation. To give the uprooted back their languages, their dreams, their fears, their humanity. This is what the Kristoff K.Roll set out 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 duo Kristoff K.Roll in the Calais Jungle, counterpointed by the texts and voice of Jean-Michel Espitalier, all bathed and literally immersed in the improvisations of a number of sound poets: 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 in 2009 delivered this Magic Lantern, a 20-minute symphonic page in the tradition of impressionist symphonic poems!
Debussy: Bruyères by Vikingur Olafsson, piano (Deutsche Grammophon, 2020)
The beauty and emotion of this hand-crafted, "home session" recording add a touch of soul to this Debussian page from the second book of the famous preludes. It's the perfect way to rediscover this "softly expressive" haiku-like piece.
Elżbieta Sikora: Cadenza for Alexis Descharmes on cello
Polish composer Elżbieta Sikora, based in France, is the author of a rich and eclectic catalog: electronic music, several chamber music works, pages for orchestra, for voice, as well as operas. This solo page explores the lyricism and low register of the instrument.
DÉGENRER, Métaclassique program, on Hémisphère son
