1 Block-Werk & Mutations 11:19
2 Soufflets 8:46
3 Abrégé 13:30
4 Cromorne & Fonds 14:29
5 Gravures 25:25
The organ has an ancient provenance, its origin being traceable to the development of a keyboard-based water organ, the hydraulus, not later than the third century BC. Over the course of its long history, it has from time to time been an important instrument of improvisation, not least in the nineteenth century when church organ music was one of the few areas of western music to avoid the pernicious influence of a newly hegemonic ideology that conceived of a musical work as an entity produced by genius composers and existing in finished form prior to performance. More recently, the organ has ceased to occupy a prominent place in improvised music, but there are still intermittent uses of it by contemporary improvisers. One musician who has shown a serious interest in the improvisatory possibilities of the instrument is Jean-Luc Guionnet, most notably to date on Pentes, a 2002 release on A Bruit Secret of recordings made in Notre Dame des Champs in Paris in April 2001. Now Hibari have released Tirets, a second set of recordings of improvisations performed during the same sessions. The newly available material finds Guionnet again eliciting a broad spectrum of unorthodox sounds from the organ, including seismic eruptions in the bass register, quiet strangulated whistles, drones, and unbroken atonal sequences of notes separated by stimulatingly large intervals. Refreshingly, the music avoids all temptations to indulge in sonic spirituality, pursuing instead a series of fascinating, resolutely godless and even desacralizing divagations through the contingencies of imagination, equipment and place. Evidently, there is still life left in the organ as a vehicle for freethinking improvisation, and it is to be hoped that as the processes of secularisation continue, at least in Europe and Scandinavia, to undermine religion as both a guiding ideology of social institutions and a meaningful belief system at the level of the individual, the opportunities for radical improvisers to utilize the instrument will increase. At length, perhaps, the ever more deserted churches will be filled not with delusional paeans to the glory of imagined transcendental perfection but the sounds of a tentative and fallible investigation of sublunary possibilities.
Paris Transatlantic
seems to be sold out visit Jean-Luc Guionnet & Hibari Music
try
