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Please note that the price varies according to the destination
Europe & Monde = 22,00 €
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France = 19,50 €
France + Suivi = 21,00 €
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Sophie Agnel : piano migrating motor complex
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Un LP FOU. Sur la pochette en couleurs la photo d’un diablotin de gargouille fièrement campé au creux d’un jardin (monastère, église médiévale ?). Gargorium… ! Daunik Lazro, le saxophoniste rebelle amoureux de la pâte sonore des utopies. Sophie Agnel auscultant, palpant les entrailles vibrantes d’un grand piano et de ses câbles tendus à tout rompre, Olivier Benoît triturant et malaxant cordes, micros, manches et électricité parasite de sa six-cordes. Méta-musique, exploration sonore, mise en commun, fétus bruitistes, scories, vibrations fumantes, … Musique enregistrée le 25 septembre 2008 par Peter Orins à la Malterie à Lille : migrating motor complex 10’05’’, vibratile 12’07’’, tony malt 7’39’ et le 17 avril 2009 par Greg Pyvka au Carré Bleu à Poitiers, grâce à Muzzix et Jazz à Poitiers. Ce n’est pas la première collaboration d’Agnel et Lazro : rien d’étonnant à cela, ces deux acteurs personnifient l’improvisation radicale en France, celle aussi qui s’évade de schémas idéologiques restrictifs . On retrouve en duo dans Marguerite d’Or Pâle sur le même label Fou Records et dans l’unique album du Quatuor Quat Neum Sixx : Live at Festival NPAI (Amor Fati). Ils ont tous deux enregistrés chacun un duo mémorable avec Phil Minton : Tasting avec Agnel (another timbre) et Alive at Sonorités avec Lazro (émouvance). Olivier Benoît entretient une proximité créative avec la pianiste depuis leur duo enregistré Rip-Stop (In situ) et ensuite Reps (Césaré). Ces rencontres renouvelées contribuent donc à un fil conducteur et une confiance réciproque dans le flux de l’improvisation.
On aime à parler de nouvelle musique d’improvisation, d’urgence, d’innovation radicale. Mais quand des enregistrements révélateurs captés en 2008 – 2009 sont publiés en 2023, on peut alors envisager la réflexion, la maturité et que sais-je, l’invariant obstiné de cette recherche qui n’en finit pas de se renouveler.
Quatre moments inédits et assez différents l’un de l’autre même si le postulat d’agrégation des sons, des timbres des actions individuels, leur interpénétration laminaire sont le dénominateur commun. Il y a très longtemps lors d’une interview, Daunik Lazro parlait de musiques d’énergie et citait ses confrères en qui il se reconnaissait. On le retrouve des décennies plus tard avec de nouveaux confrères leur laissant tout l’espace, à l’écoute et prêt à l’action. Il se rappelle à nous avec un filet de son d’alto filant dans l’espace avec une harmonique enragée et étirée (Tony Malt) puis son baryton bourdonnant par-dessus les mystères électriques et bruissants d’une guitare électrogène et des marteaux qui effleurent les notes dans la carcasse murmurante du grand. Des moments intrigants perdus dans la nuit de temps oubliés et livrant leur merveilleuse agonie. Encore merci à J-M F pour cette surprise vynilique.
J-M Van Schouwburg
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The classically-trained French pianist Sophie Agnel is known for her imaginative way of transforming the grand piano into a lively, vibrating organism with extensive preparations as well as for her collaboration with like-minded, innovative improvisers like Phil Minton and John Butcher and sound artists Lionel Marchetti and Jérôme Noetinger. Two recent releases offer her visionary, sonic imagination.
Agnel takes this trio to deliciously uncertain, heretic grounds. Lanz is a jack-of-all-trades who adds his extensive experience in playing anything, from improvised music to experimental music, from noise to turntablism, and is known as the leader of the action project Sudden Infant. Vatcher brings to this trio his experience of playing with jazz, free improvisation and avant-punk with Michael Moore, Tristan Honsinger and The Ex.
The 13 short pieces of Animals capture the wild, dadaist imagination of this trio with suggestive titles like “Laughing Hyenas”, “Lullaby For Dionysus” and “Metallic Meditation”, and often with more ironic and insightful references like the hyperactive “Michael Nyman Fell Asleep” and “Paul Rutherford's Trombone’. The dynamics are urgent and intense, creating constant, stimulating tension with unconventional and inventive techniques, but always precise ones, and with a subversive sense of humor and, obviously, many sudden twists. This trio explores radical sonic ideas, or unpredictable, rhythmic dynamics with great curiosity but no attachment. Once it is exhausted, the trio continues to its next adventure. Somehow this kind of improvised chaos makes perfect sense, and the beautiful cover artwork by Lasse Marhaug cements this trio's fascinating and joyful sonic collisions.
Agnel recorded two duo albums with fellow French guitarist Olivier Benoit (Rip-Stop, In Situ, 2003 and Reps, Césaré, 2014), who later recruited her to the Orchestre National De Jazz. She played in veteran baritone sax player Daunik Lazro's Quatuor Qwat Neum Sixx (Live at Festival NPAI 2007, Amor Fati 2009) and later recorded a duo album with him (Marguerite D'Or Pâle, Fou, 2016). Now the head of Fou Records, sound engineer and archivist of many historical free improvised meetings (and also a vintage synth wizard) Jean-Marc Foussat, has released live recordings of this short-lived trio from September 2008 at La Malterie in Lille and from April 2009 at Carré Bleu in Poitiers.
Agnel, Benoit and Lazro rely on their highly personal and unorthodox extended techniques. Agnel focuses on the inside of the grand piano and turns it into a vivid and intriguing playground, Benoit transforms his electric guitar into an abstract, and sometimes industrial sound generator and Lazro focuses on quiet, whispering breaths and long, sustained tones. The dynamics here are patient and fragile, letting the sparse, expressive percussive sounds resonate and float gently and suggest the course of the music. Each of the four pieces creates its own dream-like, sound universe but all highlight the poetic sensibility of this trio.
By Eyal Hareuveni
Sophie Agnel + Olivier Benoit + Daunik Lazro
Gargorium
Fou Records FR-LP 09
The cover of the LP Gargorium presents a remarkable photograph: a translucent image of a demonic sculpture seems to hover in a garden, its materiality suspended between air, liquid and stone. It is, however, just remarkable enough to provide apt housing for the music within, four intensely concentrated trio pieces by pianist Sophie Agnel, electric guitarist Olivier Benoit, and saxophonist Daunik Lazro, three of France’s most creative improvisers, who at times might leave one struggling to identify the instruments. While Fou regularly draws on the vast recordings of label creator Jean-Marc Foussat (who supplied the arresting cover image), the recordings were made by others, the first three tracks by Peter Orins in September 2008 at La Malterie in Lille, and the fourth by Greg Pyvka in April 2009 at Carré Bleu in Poitiers.
The opening “Migratory Motor Complex” begins with patterns of rapid mechanical clicking, not readily identifiable as any of the listed instruments, though presumably a percussive use of piano or guitar. Lazro’s saxophone (he is credited with baritone alone but restricts himself to the alto register here) gradually foregrounds a linear element amid the mechanical rhythms, but this too is as much an abstraction as the percussion. After a brief pause, the background shifts, emphasizing light and abstract feedback from Benoit’s guitar. There’s a kind of perfect inversion of definitions at work in this music. If the instruments have been abstracted from notions of conventional musical language, they have also entered a realm of absolute plasticity, emphasizing the instruments’ physicality in a way that abstains from any reference to their conventional histories.
This becomes even more marked in the succeeding pieces. “Vibratile” gives prominence to Lazro’s baritone, but he might be operating in the midst of a percussion orchestra, a multifarious assemblage of meaning-suffused knocks, scrapes, contusions, and other abrasions. Beginning Side Two, “Tony Mait” is a duet of Agnel and Benoit for the first five minutes, the former much occupied with the piano harp and a certain degree of preparation, the latter creating a polyrhythmic barrage of muffled and muted clusters. Lazro appears around the five-minute mark. Initially pecking quietly at a single high pitch, he turns it into an extended squeal, soon inspiring adjacent, quiet highs from his partners, the methods of production unclear.
The fourth and final segment, the still more dream-like “Yelloh-Carré,” begins in a maze of brushed and plucked piano strings, reverberating high guitar notes, and electronic-sounding saxophone split-tones, all mingling and mutating, sometimes isolated, sometimes conversational, extending the dance of shifting proximities and resonances that is in some sense the key operating procedure of this most inventive trio.
–Stuart Broomer in Point of Départure