![]() Since 2010, AUM grand ensemble, hybrid band between a chamber orchestra, a big band and an ultra-modern gamelan - in the sense of set of resonant instruments that Olivier Messiaen defined - reflects upon a kind of common source of different music traditions - from Renaissance’s musics to the musics of Morton Feldman, Ligeti, Grisey or LaMonte Young, and those, ancestral and innumerable, from Asia. The source of a certain physical, organic sensibility to the sound matter. A music in which composition and improvisation are constantly serving each other, guided by the search of a living, shifting sound - a music about masses, timbre melting, textures, about processes more than events, reflecting upon the role of the voice, evolution of continuous matters, long forms, non-temperated tunes, the acoustic phenomenon of beats, resonant, silence...
In You've never listened to the wind, beats, resonances or tuning are approached through a totally original point of view by the use of keyboards from an Indonesian gamelan mixed with the instrumentarium of the ensemble. The music is built around some fragments of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry coming from The Keeper of Sheep, poems that Pessoa wrote, as he liked to relate, during only few hours, a day of march 1914, almost in a trance, filled by his heteronymous Alberto Caïro, who was, according to him, a marginal, at once heir to Lao-Tseu, Milarepa and Socrates. Each of those poems are like a koan, a statement of unlearning, implied by the need to reconnect with the fullness of sensations … |
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AUM grand ensemble Julien Pontvianne clarinet, saxophone Antonin-Tri Hoang clarinet, saxophone Jean-Brice Godet clarinets, tapes Jozef Dumoulin piano Tony Paeleman fender rhodes Alexandre Herer electronics Richard Comte guitar Amélie Grould vibraphone Stéphane Garin percussions Julien Loutelier percussions Youen Cadiou bass Simon Tailleu bass Ellen Giacone voice Dylan Corlay conductor Pierre Favrez sound engineer ''stunning beauty'' (Franck Bergerot) ''Julien Pontvianne knows how to stretch the sounds when it’s about their rough essence, their vivacity, their depth. (...) a daydream who brings you literally in unsuspected dimensions.'' (Franpi Barriaux) ''extraordinary aesthetic shock. AUM’s music appears just as sensual as it is highly conceptual. It drives us away, very far beyond ourselves, in a voluptuous world of sounds from which we come back changed. Closed to a ritual, allowing time to time, this music is similar to a real purifying bath.'' (Ludovic Florin) ''a music of a discreet but implacable power - that creates the unspeakable and alters all the benchmarks. The feeling to reach a somewhere without a name emerges. Julien Pontvianne and his musicians hold the time at their fingertips, compress and stretch it according to their will.'' (Denis Desassis) |