Gérard Hourbette was one of the main players in Art Zoyd, that remarkable French art-rock group that achieved so many great things in the 1970s and 1980s, even exceeding Henry Cow and Peter Hammill for complexity and surpassing the insane Italian progsters Semiramis when it comes to all-out bonkers symphonic prog excess. Hourbette went on to found Art Zoyd Studios in Valenciennes, a highly commendable enterprise which fosters new talent in electronic and digital music, providing recording facilities, enabling research, teaching, and record distribution among its many tentacles of endeavour.
Since 2002, they’ve been compiling and releasing a series of records under the rubric Expériences De Vol (experiences of flight), which I’ve managed to miss for the most part, but now here comes the excellent three-disc set Expériences De Vol #15#16#17 (IN-POSSIBLE RECORDS EXP23/13). Unlike the earlier releases in the series which were effectively collaborative affairs between Art Zoyd and Musiques Nouvelles Ensemble, today’s release is a showcase for 16 talented European composers, largely in the electro-acoustic area, some names even familiar to this listener.
They did well to lead off the set with Christian Zanési – a veteran of the INA GRM studio (albeit a late straggler), his Stop! L’Horizon is a personal favourite and has been on my find-a-physical-copy list for many years. His ‘Before the Blast’ here is an understated exercise in tape composition, yet it’s compelling – you can’t turn away from its mesmerising hum for a second. Annabelle Playe is one we’ve heard on a record by Franck Vigroux many years ago – known for her voice experiments – and she’s had at least two releases on his label also. Her ‘Arca’ isn’t as abrasive as Vigroux often was, but I enjoy the brooding darkness it suggests with its broken and craggy forms.
Dror Feiler (Israeli ex-pat living in Stockholm) panders to my love of near-chaotic rubble with his excellent blast ‘The Archipelago of Noise Islands’. With booklet liner notes written in French, I don’t fully grasp the method by which he arrived at this delicious slice of multi-layered polyphony, but it verges on being overwhelming – all the moving parts rotating in complex planes. Parisian Nadia Ratsimandresy comes to us from a conservatoire background and has also composed for theatre and dance, but she’s by no means a sedate salon player as her ‘Pinte de Cafe’ will testify. It seems from her notes that the piece is about an energy so wild and strange that it cannot even say its own name. She also states for the record that she “detests” coffee and will never drink it again, a risky statement to make in any given Parisian brasserie, but she carries on unafraid with these sullen, humming, lower-register tones, any moment of which could wither a young pretender who’s aiming for success on the Mego label.
Swiss sax maniac Antoine Chessex proposes an ‘Avalanche’ with his typical amplified-instrument drones, which has a nice surface sound but as usual this player doesn’t manage to advance the music to any new aesthetic conclusions. Barbara Dang is a new name to me, but has appeared with Peter Orins on a few Circum-Disc records; her ‘Hypostasis’ is very reminiscent of Elaine Radigue, a crystal-clear minimal tone produced by electronic means. Raphaël Ortis is a Swiss bassist and composer who may have showed up on one of the numerous collaborative group pieces from the label Insub.Rec. I do like his title ‘C’est Déjà Arrivera’, which is not only a mild linguistic riddle but also hints at an imminent end-of-life scenario of which we’ve already received some clues on previous tracks in the set. I’d have liked Ortis to exhibit just a shade more muscle in his time-stretched, digitally-delayed, long-form emanations; the piece just feels like an endless crawl over stony ground, to no apparent aim.
Gerard Lebik has been doing great things in Poland with the music festival he runs in Wroclaw, and has collaborated with many great international musicians – his piece has a lengthy title apparently rhapsodising the beauties of a sunset in an urban setting. Oddly enough this title does a better job of invoking this natural phenomenon than his rather muffled and unadventurous music, but at least it does contain an aura of quiet mystery. Young cellist Brice Catherine is another unknown name – their ‘Chili and Bonbon’ has a distressed (and distressing) aspect which is ennervating and provocative, but ultimately the chaotic surface simply reveals more chaos underneath. Even less prolific is Mirtru Escalona-Mijares, although they may have appeared on an earlier Belgian comp called Métamorphoses 2016; ‘La Sierpe Alada del Sueno’ is a heartfelt composition which refers directly to a humanitarian crisis in his home country of Venezuela. With voice and contra-bass contributions from Charlotte Testu, this is a poetic and moving work with a lot of emotional truth. It may start out subdued and cryptical, but it grows into something much larger and quite harrowing, avoiding many potential pitfalls which often ensnare those who attempt “relevancy” through political statements in art.
Lastly the very prolific Julien Ottavi, gifted in everything from free improvisation to extreme noise and modernist composition, offers us ‘Cremator Opera’. This is but one excerpt from a larger operatic piece of this name, which he’s made with noise-generators, synthetic voices, and artificial intelligence software. The latter element touches on a development which I know is controversial and highly-contested, but I suppose it’s at least interesting to see the technique being applied to digital composition. If anyone can tame AI, Ottavi is the one to do it. The 15:22 minutes of solemn music here are profoundly depressing and make a suitable ending for a compilation which, if read in a certain way, might refer to aspects of our contemporary life in a very pessimistic fashion. Very good. From 23 Feb 2024.