Le son des silences

 "untitled" - Louise Bourgeois

"D’aucuns sourient à l’idée que l’on puisse trouver un quelconque intérêt à enregistrer
du silence, comme ils s’amusent à la vue d’une ampoule d’Air de Paris de Marcel Duchamp.
Les mêmes pourtant s’extasient devant un portrait groupé de leur progéniture ou simplement à l’écoute de leur musique favorite. Or, c’est de cela qu’il s’agit. Le silence enregistré, ou associé en pensée à un objet, est fixé, identifié et délimité. Il devient un espace hors-nature, paré à se confondre de nouveau avec elle comme le fait la photo de famille dans la mémoire, comme le fait la musique dans l’écho du monde. Il fait sourire de gêne, parce qu’il absorbe tout sauf la peur de soi-même."
"Le son des silences" - Samon Takahashi -  2015

Cet article inédit de Samon Takahashi, enfin publié par le blog Labelle 69 est disponible en français et aussi en anglais. Il recense les enregistrements connus du silence sur disques CD et vinyl, de John Cage à Crass, de Ligeti à Christian Marclay ...

version française (pdf)

"Grooving in silence" is a review by Samon Takahashi, initially published by Mono #2 (Portugal) in 2014, then joined to "drift#2-LP"  of Yann Leguay in 2016. It identifies known recordings of silence on CD and vinyl, from John Cage to Crass, Ligeti to Christian Marclay ...

english version (pdf)

to listen to: this special 4'33" version in Toulouse, France, early 2012

Conjure

 Kip Hanrahan born in 1954 in a Puerto Rican area of the Bronx, is one of my favorite musical producer and former of the famous record label "American Clavé"  where, for records and concerts, he could get together great artists as Jack Bruce, Jerry Gonzàlez, Hilton Ruiz, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Don Pullen, Milton Cardona, Arto Lindsay, Anton Fier, David Moss, Steve Swallow, the great unknown Alfredo Triff and many many others...

 

"Kip Hanrahan, a producer, a composer, a percussionist and facilitator, Kip Hanrahan has an uncanny ability to assemble remarkable musicians and apply their talents in interesting ways. The results are often magical. His records are as enigmatic as he is, and maybe that heightens the attraction and expectation..." 

by Glenn Astarita

"Conjure" is one of his special project 
with
Ishmael Reed: poetry & voice
Taj Mahal: voice & guitar
David Murray: tenor saxophon & bass clarinet
Terry Yosvany: piano & saxophon
Fernando Saunders: bass & voice
Anthony Cox: drums
Billy Bang: violin
Leo Nocentelli: guitar
Pedrito Martinez: percussion
Dafnis Prietos: drums

Nota: about Billy Bang, the violin player, you can also look the trailer of the movie directed by my friend Markus Hansen on his website: HERE  (click on "film" , then on "Redemption song" )

Here, from jazz to guaganco, blues and poetry, a splendid movie (with password: 8Conjure) directed by Jérôme de Missolz around the amazing "Conjure" concert in "Banlieues Bleues" (Paris) in 2003 - co-production Banlieues Bleues, Mezzo & La Huit production
(another  Jérôme de Missolz's movie here)

password : 8Conjure

Poème électronique

Pour l’Exposition Universelle de 1958 à Bruxelles, le directeur de la maison Philips commanda un pavillon à l'architecte Le Corbusier.  Celui-ci répondit ”Je ne ferai pas de pavillon ; je ferai un Poème électronique avec la bouteille qui le contiendra”, et prit immédiatement contact avec Edgar Varèse (1883-1965).

Le Corbusier expliquera son choix dans une lettre à Fernand Ouellette, auteur d’un ouvrage sur Varèse (publié chez Seghers en 1966): ”Immédiatement j'ai pensé à Varèse, dont je n'avais pas eu à m'occuper depuis près de vingt-cinq ans. Et cela fut si fort que je déclarai que je n'entreprendrais cette tâche qu'à la condition que ce soit Varèse qui fasse la musique.”

 

Enregistré sur une bande à trois pistes et diffusé sur 450 haut-parleurs dans le pavillon finalement dessiné par Iannis Xenakis,  le ”Poème électronique” durait 8 minutes, et pour les entractes, Xenakis avait composé une courte musique intitulée ”Concret PH”  (PH pour Parabole/Hyperbole).

***

partition et notes du "poème électronique"  ICI en pdf

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Bombs of Beirut

"Bombs of Beirut" is a piece for a string quartet with prerecorded backing vocal tracks and live processing composed by the Armenian-American composer  Mary Kouyoumadjian.

"Lebanon, once the refuge where my grandparents and great-grandparents sought safety from the Armenian Genocide, became the dangerous home my parents and brother were forced to abandon during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). We often read stories and see images in the news about violent events in the Middle East, but we very rarely get to hear the perspective of an individual who lived through them. Inspired by loved ones who grew up during the Lebanese Civil War, it is my hope that Bombs of Beirut provides a sonic picture of what day-to-day life is like in a turbulent Middle East –– not filtered through the news and media, but through the real words of real people. The prerecorded backing track includes interviews with family and friends who shared their various experiences living in a time of war; it also presents sound documentation of bombings and attacks on civilians tape-recorded on an apartment balcony between 1976-1978."
notes from the Mary Kouyoumadjian's official website

In three parts "before the war, the war, after the war", this piece was played by the Kronos Quartet for their 40th anniversary in 2014.

Fragmentings of Things

"Fragmentings of Things", originally provoked into being by Adam Buck’s 18th century Irish painting, "Tambourina", of a woman using a large tambourine to shield her head from the sun, is a collaborative work that questions the boundaries of tangibility and voids: a drummer talking about the physicality and communality of his craft; materials falling onto the surface of a drum; the emptiness of the cavity hidden beneath this tactile contact and its resonance and sounding out of darkness, like the body itself whose singing falls on the eardrum, as James Joyce wrote, “into the deeps” to lie quiet as moss as a memory of some temporal placing between the senses close to the life of death.
This film is a highly personal reverie on the physicality and craft of drumming by a percussionist as he beats, taps, scrapes and strokes the different surfaces and materials he explores. Roger Turner has for many years been at the forefront of defining different extremes of percussion, working around the world with musicians and artists.

A film by Barry Lewis and Emil Charlaff
devised and composed by David Toop
Percussionist  & dialogue : Roger Turner
Voices: Elaine Mitchener

    Part 1 

    Part 2

4 Walls

 4 Walls est un l'étonnant quatuor composé de Phil Minton (vocal), Luc Ex (guitar bass), Veryan Weston (piano) et Michael Vatcher (drums).
Leur musique, indescriptible, est un vaste mix de free-jazz, poésie sonore, hard trash R'n'R, bruitisme transversal, blues languissant, psychédélisme mutant ... etc...

Late 90s, Luc Ex and Tom Cora started a band called "Roof": a quartet with vocal virtuoso Phil Minton and drummer Michael Vatcher. After Tom tragic death the group continued under the name "4 Walls" with the pianist Veryan Weston. 

Ici, à la Dynamo de "Banlieues Bleues" en 2004, un brillant concert filmé magistralement par  Jérome de Missolz qui nous a malheureusement quitté le mois dernier. Un film produit par La Huit.