Fans of free improvisation, intuitive music, and the European tradition of avant art music will find much to enjoy on this endlessly twisting abstract headscratcher. It is like a puzzle that can only be solved when I stop trying.
An endlessly twisting abstract headscratcher
The graphic novel and comic book artists are adept at crafting visual diaries, autobiographies, and memoirs. Yet avantgarde sound artists and composers have been doing the same thing. They just don’t have the same cultural cache as the graphic novelist. Perhaps because it is a more abstract form of investigating selfhood and the things a person experiences. The audio diary in question here, interrogates the year 2015. However, it is a false interrogation. How much is memory a fiction? How much does the interrogated lie for the interrogator? Is the story at all cohesive?
“The narrative, if one wants to hear any, comes from the meeting between chronologies, the shape of the snippets, the fortuitous accidents and such, yet all in the absence of any sequential logic.”
These are some of the questions Jean-Luc Guionnet brings to his work. The first piece is an electroacoustic work commissioned by INA GRM for PRÉSENCES ÉLECTRONIQUE in 2016. The second piece is a version he composed for the Ensemble ONCEIM and Motus, and commissioned by La Muse en Circuit (CNCM) and recorded in 2021. Now the two are welded together, even as they curve.
The cover artwork jibes well with the title Tournures Cessent or Ceasing Turns in English. It looks almost like it could be a Möbius Strip. In a way, the half-twist that creates the Möbius can be heard in the two versions here. One seems to be comprised of field recordings and other bric-a-brac of life as gathered by the artist and arranged in its way. The other is an electracoustic version where the Ensemble ONCEIM, a large group of traditional instrument players and synthesists do another version of the piece. Joined together they flow.
Listening one cannot consistently distinguish if the sounds are moving counterclockwise in a turn, or flipping back to the “normal” side of the strip in a recursive way. The one piece informed the other and is its conjoined mirror.
Fans of free improvisation, intuitive music, and the European tradition of avant art music will find much to enjoy on this endlessly twisting abstract headscratcher. It is like a puzzle that can only be solved when I stop trying.
Tournures Cessent / Tournures Cessent Orchestrales is available on Aposiopèse. [Bandcamp]
