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Bazelaire "Grounds" + Matthews "Love Shark"
Félicie Bazelaire presents three newly-commisioned works with her project "Grounds" for solo double bass
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Kaffe Matthews presents her solo piece "Love Shark," a duet with oscillators spun around the room by 6 hammerhead sharks she met swimming in the Pacific Ocean, April 2009. We also see her film "Hammers Gather."
In english, it means the surface of the earth, a property, an area. Here,
'Grounds is a set of pieces and a place of doublebass experimental exploration.
Echos is inspired from our auditive environment and is poetically expressed on an acoustic instrument—the double bass. This piece is based on resonances—from a note, from the instrument’s body, from the performance space. The musician will be guided by the acoustics for the time of silences.
Basse seule is a series of études and pieces for double bass composed by Bertrand Denzler for Félicie Bazelaire. The music is built on simple systems, which allow an exploration of some characteristics and limits of the instrument, as well as the situation of the instrumentalist playing alone. The sonorities are raw, the pulse is regular, creating a space where the wave can unfold until reaching the foundation of its function: the bass. Like a reminiscence of history, pizzicatos, scordaturas and long bowed notes are the main tools of the pieces. Within the systems, the musician has to choose between countless options and to venture in winding and unmanageable paths in order to reveal the sound’s complexity and fragility.
L'épaisseur innombrable ("The innumerable thickness") is a piece made of a system of objects (gestures and chords) restricted and precise, linear but never repeating itself identically, a very slow waltz bringing back the double bass to a series of fragile and poetic sound manifestations, to "Nothing more. But the innumerable thickness, asleep." ("Plus rien. Que l'épaisseur innombrable, endormie").
More info here :
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"Grounds" kindly supported by the Henneberger-Mercier Fondation, Nicati-De Luz Fondation, the SUISA, the Ville de Lausanne and Pro Helvetia.
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Matthews' "Love Shark"
Sharks are older than dinosaurs. They have evolved with the planet developing extraordinaryperceptive mechanisms, and have learnt to navigate in straight lines by tracing the shifts in the earth's magnetic crust at depths as great as 400m. They are still considered violent aggressors and continue to be slaughtered in vast numbers just for their fins to make soup. The truth is that a shark has to be one of the most sophisticated and beautiful of animals.
Love Shark is a four channel solo by Kaffe Matthews in which she duets with 6 oscillators driven by 6 hammerhead sharks whose journeys were recorded north of Wolf Island, Galapagos April 2009. Matthews dived with, recorded underwater and filmed hammerheads whilst on a month's residency on the Galapagos islands 2009. She later worked with shark scientists who gave her this shark hunting journey data. Her 3D sound installation, You might come out of the water every time singing has shown in Liverpool, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London and the St Pieters Caves, Maastricht.
Software instrument collaboration and programming was with Adam Parkinson.
Awarded sound artist and composer Kaffe Matthews was born in Essex, England and lives and works in London. Since 1990 she has made and performed new electro-acoustic music worldwide with a variety of things and places such as violin, theremin, wild salmon, Scottish weather, NASA scientists, bicycles, hammerhead sharks, school children, desert stretched wires and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Currently she is introducing and internationally developing bicrophonics ~ interactive composition for outdoor enjoyment with bicycles through the Bicrophonic Research Institute(BRI).
More info here :
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