05 January 2012

Jean-Luc Guionnet Project














Never Come Ashore and Arika and Glasgow University Music Department Present:

Investigation 1: Jean-Luc Guionnet

What’s the best way to spend time with a musician when they visit a city to perform? And when the musician in question has a great deal to say, what sort of concert do you organise to do justice to that?

We’ve asked the highly interesting and all round fantastic Jean-Luc Guionnet to come to Glasgow to play, to talk about what he does and to collaborate. There will be two public concerts, a talk and four days of investigative work with musicians, theorists and artists from around Glasgow. There will be a solo organ concert on Sunday the 5th of February and Jean-Luc will be accompanied by his long term colleague Seijiro Murayama for a performance at the Kinning Park Complex on the 9th.

Concert 1: Jean-Luc Guionnet organ solo, University of Glasgow Chapel Sunday 5th February 8pm, free.

Talk : Jean-Luc Guionnet - ‘Propositions for an Inhabited Architecture of Listening’ Wednesday 8th February 5:15pm Room 2, first floor, Music Department.

Concert 2: Duo with Seijiro Murayama + performances of compositions by Jean-Luc Guionnet, Seijiro Murayama and others. Kinning Park Complex Thursday 9th February 8pm, free.

Jean-Luc Guionnet's work is divided into as many parts as he has opportunities to think and act in sound and image. This work is to do with encountering something strong external to himself and is articulated through improvisation, composition, electroacoustic projects, field recording, electronics and theory. His organ performances are about encountering the machine, the mechanism of the organ; part vehicle and part artificial intellegence, taking the breath of the machine and its direction in space and letting that breath vibrate in its own certain way without losing its raw quality; exploring the length of propagation, the magnitude of the reverb. Each organ is unique. The project is to find out what makes it unique.

Seijiro Murayama’s percussion work and compositions are wildly serious. Super focused and tactile whether hovering on the inaudible spectrum or cracking space open. His approach is based on attention to space and place, the energy of the public and especially the quality of silence at different levels, physical, social, ontological. Since 1999 he has lived and worked in France collaborating within other art forms such as dance (Catherine Diverrès), video (Olivier Gallon), painting (Francis Bidault), philosophy (Jean-Luc Nancy, Ray Brassier) and performance (Diego Chamy) etc.. He also works on many purely sonic projects; with Jean-Luc Guionnet, Eric La Casa, Axel Dörner, Tim Blechmann, Seymour Wright, Toshimaru Nakamura, Toshiya Tsunoda.

Review of their recent duo CD.