Thursday 16 May 2024, 7.30pm
Thursday 16 May
- Stevie Wishart (hurdy gurdy) - solo
- Andrew Choate with his words - solo
- ANGLE (Jean-Philippe Gross / Jean-Luc Guionnet) - sax+electronics
Three-Day residency with the great Parisian artist, Jean-Luc Guionnet, whose practice encompasses composition, improvisation, filmmaking, and philosophy. Approaching his instruments as imperfect vehicles of artificial intelligence, his attentive engagement applies speculative pressure to the expressive limits of their material properties. In his hands, design flaws and repressed qualities transform into catalysts for novel sonic emanations, and the simplest of processes are mobilized to extract infinitesimal acoustic detail. Although a formidable solo performer, Guionnet is no stranger to collaboration, something which the range of artists involved across these three days testifies to.
"I want these three days to be something like an knotwork or an interlace — but I like the knot ! — of times, practices, and friendships. I also wanted to invit artists who rarely or never played in Oto.
So, a knotwork of différent stories : from Stevie I first saw with Machine for Making Sense in the 90's to to Lucien with who I worked on the composition Plafond de Verre with the Lunar Error Ensemble in 2018. From the wordy performance of Andrew to the full of sense and non-sense abstraction in the composition we worked on, with Cristian on the acoustic guitar : Table de Poussières (Table for Dust). From the all life long, 1986…, friendship, artistic exchanges and collaborations with Christophe to the crossing roams with Fritz. The everyday collaboration with Lotus. The rare but back in the days music we do together with Jean-Philippe : Angle 4. And then, the endless spiral of the duet with Seijiro… which will be the first concert of all.
There will probably happen dancing on the spot, instrumental performance, up to down duets, rage together with the machine, speculative gesture, up side down old settings in solos… but many other things, that's for sure." – Jean-Luc Guionnet
"My musical work subdivides itself into as many ways as occasions arise for me to think and act with sound and forms. Those occasions have always to do with a strong meeting with an outside element : an instrument (saxophone/organ), a theoretical idea (what is "rumour"?), and mainly a collaborating friend (Lotus Edde Khouri, Éric La Casa, Thomas Bonvalet, Seijiro Murayama) ... or the long term adventure of a team (Hubbub, Ames Room, Jupiter Terminus ...). There then follows a collection of themes which, in turn, influence the evolution of the musical work and define the direction of meetings to come: the thickness of the air, the pidgin, the musical instrument considered as affective automaton, sound as a signature of space, signature of objects, signature of what it is not... The coming emotion is made out of all these strata and the sliding of one over the other during the act of listening. When music is giving time."
At the crossroads of electronic and instrumental music, Jean-Philippe Gross develops a physical relationship with sound, playing with ruptures and acoustic phenomena.
In concert, he collaborates with Stéphane Garin (Dénombrement & Plan affine), eRikm, Clare Cooper (Nevers), Camille Mutel (dance), Jean-Luc Guionnet, Marc Baron …
Never locked into any systematism, Jean-Philippe Gross allows himself the extremes to take advantage of a wide field of possibilities and pays particular attention to the timbre, the grain and the quality of the sound, even rough. He works for dance, has composed for small ensembles (Dedalus ensemble, Phonoscopie).
From October 2001 to June 2009 he was engaged as a music program curator for Fragment (Metz, France). In 2019, he started the record label Eich.
Andrew Choate is a writer who was born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina. His books include Language Makes Plastic of the Body (2006), Stingray Clapping (2012), Too Many Times I See Every Thing Just the Way It Is (2014), Learning (2018) and A Rational Arrangement of All the Senses: Season One (2024). As a passionate admirer of bollards––the concrete and steel posts that protect buildings, equipment, and people from vehicles––Choate adopts the persona of Saint Bollard, performing with and photographing these ubiquitous objects (IG @saintbollard), leading Slate to call him “the world’s foremost bollard photographer.” Awards for this work include Best Newcomer, Best Visual/ Performance Art and the Warwick Broadhead Memorial Award at Fringe Festivals in Dunedin and Auckland. He curates The Unwrinkled Ear concert series in Los Angeles and is working with Keith Rowe on an artist's book documenting Rowe's visual work.
