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Starting out in traditional music and folk ball, hurdy-gurdy player Yann Gourdon put his drones at the service of experimental music, founding the group France in 2005. Performing solo or in all kinds of ensemble configurations, he has helped to demonstrate, alongside the twelve musicians of the La Nòvia collective, how tradition can be reinvented today, opening up immersive and hypnotic fields of sound exploration.
Interview conducted on February 12, 2021
Let's start with your background and training. What led you to choose this instrument, the hurdy-gurdy? When did that happen?
It goes back to my childhood: my father was a musician, a fiddler and a practitioner of traditional Irish music. The hurdy-gurdy was one of the instruments I came across, and after playing classical piano, I suddenly felt the urge to play. I started at the age of twelve. I took lessons in Grenoble with Isabelle Pignol and Valentin Clastrier.
They're two of the great names in hurdy-gurdy music. What did they bring to you?
They gave me a way of approaching and conceiving the instrument that tended towards openness to other musical fields. My father was friends with luthier Denis Soriat, who developed the first electroacoustic hurdy-gurdy prototype, notably for Valentin Clastrier. So my first instrument wasn't a traditional shape, it was a flat hurdy-gurdy, which was already an upheaval for me.
What's the difference between a flat hurdy-gurdy and a traditional hurdy-gurdy?
There are traditional flat hurdy-gurdies in the shape of a guitar, and others in the round shape of a lute. In the 18th century, the nobility and bourgeoisie became very fond of this instrument, and many luthiers began transforming lutes and guitars into hurdy-gurdies. Denis Soriat's flat hurdy-gurdies, however, have a contemporary form that has nothing to do with the guitar; he designed them with a view to electrifying them with piezo pickups (contact pickups). The four distinct parts of the hurdy-gurdy are the melodies (chanterelles), the bourdon, the chien (bourdon strings) and the sympathetic strings.
Between 1993 and 2003, you played with the group Djal ("Du Jour Au Lendemain"). Is this a traditional music group?
Djal is a special story, linked to my father. We used to play in the street, begging for money, and in the Grenoble association where he gave violin lessons. There, every week, an open stage was organized in the form of a ball, where we played as a duo. Some of my father's friends joined in. The group Djal emerged from these encounters. The group still exists today. They play a folk ball with no regional specificity, drawing on all kinds of repertoires and dances from all over France.
So traditional music is a real breeding ground for you?
It's what propelled me. I really started out in this milieu. I was in a professional environment from the age of 13, and I think that's what determined me to go on with music.
In 1999, you turned to experimental music. You studied at the École Nationale de Musique de Villeurbanne until 2003. What drew you to this field of music, after having played so much traditional music?
It's the fruit of total chance and an encounter. Someone introduced me to the paradoxical sounds of Jean-Claude Risset, which really struck a chord with me. At the same time, I'd discovered the music of Stockhausen and Varèse on the radio, which tickled my ears. I called Bernard Fort and took his courses in electroacoustics, composition, free improvisation and analog synthesis.
You then enrolled at the Beaux-Arts in Valence, where your interest still lies in sound experiments. What do your projects involve?
I wanted to return to a context of research and experimentation. I went to the Beaux-Arts to look for a visual dimension. I wanted to work with video and installation: to think about works in space. It was there that I met Jérémie (Sauvage) on bass and Mathieu (Tilly) on drums, with whom we formed the group France.
This France group was born at that time, in 2005?
Jérémie and I used to get together every Tuesday in the amphitheatre to prepare performances, with very different set-ups. One day, Jérémie suggested we do a cover version of Faust and Tony Conrad's album. We went in search of a drummer and found Mathieu. The band was born.
Why did you choose this name for your band?
It's purely a reference to the first name France, there's no nationalist idea, no rejection or provocation.
Do your performances rely on pure improvisation, or are there planned moments, are the performances mapped out in advance?
We've been playing the same thing for over ten years now, and we never get tired of it. The rhythmic foundation is provided by the bass and drums. The hurdy-gurdy fills the space on this fixed foundation, in a more improvised gesture, but one that remains constrained to a process. The development of the hurdy-gurdy is always quite similar, and varies only according to the playing context, the space and the audience's interaction. Jérémie and I play in the pit, in the audience. We get into the same flow as the listeners, to hear what they hear, to create feedback between them and our music.
Your music is based on continuous sounds, drones, implied by your instrument itself, and on a very particular management of time, based on its elasticity, which leads to an immersive notion, the loss of reference points and a plunge into the heart of the sound. What are your influences in this area?
My primary influence is the hurdy-gurdy and its drones. As soon as I started tinkering with my instrument, I realized that I was abandoning myself to this continuous sound. I was strengthened by meeting musicians such as Tony Conrad, La Monte Young and Phill Niblock. I was also greatly influenced by the works ofAlvin Lucier, another American composer with a genuine interest in the spatial and acoustic dimensions of sound. I wanted to bathe in a drone and try to hold on to it. Back then, I was in my infancy. Now I can go much further. I listen to everything that can develop in a drone: there's a multitude of things to listen to inside it, it opens up new worlds, new directions, little nooks and crannies to go and find.
You used a very strong word: "surrender". That's what it feels like to listen to your music live. You have to let yourself go completely. If there's a block, the experience doesn't work. But the moment you accept to be overwhelmed and let yourself be totally taken by this continuum of sound, something happens. So you're talking about the same phenomenon on the musician's side?
First of all, it does require an effort to get past a point where you have to let go of your fears, cultural references and habits. I really like this notion of losing one's bearings. Working over long periods of time means you no longer know what temporality you're in; just as working on acoustic spaces, playing with sound reflections, means losing your bearings in space, no longer knowing exactly where the sound is coming from. For me, this is the place of vertigo, the limit before falling.
You're looking for a dynamic relationship with the places where you perform. You worked on this subject at the Beaux-Arts in Valence, and it's something you've experimented with throughout your career. How does it work in practice: when you arrive at a venue, do you study the room?
It's very instinctive, and it's mostly in the playing that it happens. Not all spaces lend themselves to it. There are places where resonance and loss of reference points are difficult to achieve. That's when you have to look for processes in the music itself.
I think there's a protest dimension to your attitude to time, your rejection of frameworks and the commensurable vision of our societies. Can you confirm this?
I don't know about protesting, but what's certain is that I don't like frameworks or labels. I don't like to be confined, preferring to seek out the border zones, the fuzzier, more impalpable places. That's what I'm looking for in sound, but it's also no doubt a way of life. These days, we're obliged to put labels on everything. I myself use them: "traditional music" and "experimental music" are labels. I give a very particular meaning to "traditional", which isn't necessarily the same as yours,Erwan's (Keravec) or Lise's (Barkas). For example, in my work on rhythmic phase shifting, it's not so much the effect of the shift that interests me as what happens in the interval of the shift, which suddenly opens up a new field. I'm interested in all these microphenomena, these blurred boundaries that we don't pay attention to a priori.
Apart from the fact that you make it sound, does your hurdy-gurdy have any special features that distinguish it from traditional versions (playing modes, extra strings, etc.)?
In terms of lutherie, a lot has been tried and tested over the last fifty years. I recently changed my hurdy-gurdy to a simpler, smaller, more efficient instrument. I switched from alto to soprano, with fewer strings. It was made by Joël Traunecker with a motor on the wheel, on the principle of Léo Maurel's boîte à bourdon. I can still use it with the crank. Even when the motor is running, I can keep my hand on the crank for sound transformations.
Do you add any effects to your hurdy-gurdy, such as distortion?
I use very few effects. When I was young, I tried every possible effect. I've abandoned them all except one: the delay. I use it to generate repetitive patterns.
Do you still play traditional music today?
Yes, of course I do. It's one of the central elements that brings together the La Nòvia collective, of which I'm a member. We're a dozen musicians, most of us from traditional music backgrounds. Alongside a wide range of more experimental offerings, we also include specific groups of traditional dance music. We are brought together by a common sensibility, deeply linked to traditional music, both through our instrumentation (hurdy-gurdies, bagpipes, fiddles...) and because we have been touched by certain aspects of this music, which we have eventually developed in more contemporary and experimental practices.
La Nòvia brings together artists from the Haute-Loire, Auvergne, Rhône-Alpes, Béarn, Cévennes, Hautes-Alpes and Alsace. How did this collective come into being?
The collective was initiated by our bagpipe, guitar and hurdy-gurdy trio, Toad, which began at the same time as France, in 2005 (with Pierre-Vincent Fortunier and Guilhem Lacroux). It's a very electric trio, with whom we've performed traditional Auvergne music. The association became La Nòvia, which enabled us to employ Elodie, my partner and production manager. The meeting of Basile Brémaud and Jacques Puech brought other personalities around Toad, new projects, new groups. The collective gradually became what it is today, with its twelve musicians.
Where does the name La Nòvia come from?
If I remember correctly, it's a tribute from Acid Mothers Temple's eponymous album, which featured a cover of a traditional Occitan song of the same title, meaning "the young bride".
You were talking about dance groups in la Nòvia. I've heard you talk about bourrée, a traditional dance from Auvergne, in which you talk about the body's constant imbalance and rebalancing. Is this something that influences your music?
There are indeed the basic steps, the cadence steps, that make bourrée recognizable, but constantly readapted to suit the environment. That's what I really like about this dance, the management of space, which requires you to listen to more than just the sound. You have to sense the other dancers so as not to collide. This generates a very particular kind of attention, to which is added, in my opinion, a game of seesaw, a movement just before the fall, before taking off again in another step. That's what I'm looking for.
You've collaborated with a lot of different groups. You've also recorded a huge number of albums (I've counted thirty-eight, solo or with various groups). How do you explain this thirst for creation, recording and encounters?
Records aren't an end in themselves for me. It took me a long time to decide to record albums. At first, I wasn't interested at all. I started making records with Toad and la Nòvia, simply because it enabled us to get our music out there, to make it known, to have concert dates. It was purely functional, and still is to some extent. I consider what you find there as a particular moment in the music, but which could be completely different in concert, or if we had recorded it a few days later. But I'm not completely ignoring the artistic dimension: when we make a record, I think about how to adapt the music so that it can be perceived as well as possible, and tend towards what I'd like to be heard. And then it has to be said that on this number of records, there are elements that I don't control. That's the case with records from France. We never go into the studio with this band, they're all live recordings, and sometimes quite random ones at that. I think some of them were just made with a little recorder held by someone in the audience. In fact, for France, I don't have any control at all, Jérémie takes care of that with his label. I've made the choice to leave it to him, that's the way I want it. In my opinion, it makes no sense for a band like France to exist on record. These albums exist, and I don't deny them either, but I consider records to be archives, and they don't have any more value than that for me. If they were to disappear, I wouldn't be unhappy about it. What I need is to be confronted with the live situation, in a situation of proximity with the listener.
Interview by Guillaume Kosmicki
