Jean-Luc Guionnet / Dan Warburton / Éric La Casa / Philip Samartzis
Parking
FRANCE SWARMING 016 CD (2024)
Latest release from La Casa’s label is another very successful alignment of site-specific documentary recordings with a form of improvised music…not too far apart in its intentions and its results from the Installations record, which we heard in 2021, and likewise involved the participation of Guionnet.
Jean-Luc Guionnet is himself no stranger to actively engaging with buildings and architecture, staging unusual performances across many rooms of a gallery, or responding to the acoustic properties afforded by any enclosed area. Here, the assembled team are doing it with underground parking garages in Paris and Melbourne; Guionnet and Warburton played their sax and violin, La Casa and Samartzis did the recordings (and edited the tapes). Perhaps I should point out that this isn’t a recording of a concert of some sort; although the players are seasoned improvisers, their musical contributions are quite minimal, and may be intended to act as some sort of reference point or marker, to make a wider statement about the urban space that surrounds them. It’s to do with “the acoustic, spatial and material character” of the parking garage, as Samartzis points out in his very articulate notes, detailing many audio nuances of the two chosen sites which we might have overlooked. And indeed the circumstances of the recordings, since the second piece ‘Parking 2’ – a combination of recordings from Paris and Melbourne sites – was conducted during COVID lockdown, and Samartzis takes an interest in the sounds made by lights, air vents and refrigeration units, which only became audible when normal human activity was reduced to zero.
Meanwhile we also have the testimony of Jean-Luc Guionnet and his story about life in a 1970s apartment block and his observations about the parking garage; his vivid descriptions show his acute perception of air, space, sounds, and colours, disclosing a lot of pragmatic truths and harsh realities about urban living that have never occurred to most of us, not least the town planners and architects who devise these spaces. To come to terms with all the noise and air pollution, and to process his thoughts and ideas, Guionnet made lots of sound recordings, recordings which were later repurposed into compositions; all of his work should be mandatory listening for any student enrolling at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture in Paris.
I see the three of them (minus Warburton) have appeared before on Soleil D’Artifice (2009) and Stray Shafts of Sunlight (2013) on this same label. I can see how this release aligns with La Casa’s general sound-art agenda, which concerns itself with urban spaces, hidden and hard-to-detect sounds, and a general interest in everyday spaces which we take for granted or tend to overlook. An underground parking garage is potentially quite a banal zone, but La Casa and the team not only manage to explore its space in sonic and musical terms, but also discover and create something of beauty. (08/03/2024)