WPB3 (Werchowska / Pontevia / Boubaker)

A Floating World

Label: Mikroton Recordings Country: Russia

"The French WPB3 trio explores areas between abstract minimalist contemporary concrete instrumental improvised music and energetic noisy free jazz with an uncompromisingly totally free approach.

Nusch Werchowska has been involved in improvised music since she met Barre Philips in 1993. A pianist who is able to translate a conversation between Debussy and Cecil Taylor as well as John Cage using all kinds of prepared techniques. She played with numerous musicians in the field of improvised music such as Eddie Prevost, Margrit Rieben, Bertrand Gauguet, Christine Sehnaoui, Mathieu Werchowski and others.

Mathias Pontevia plays drums in different contexts: rock, improvised music and cross-platform meetings with dancers. He made himself his drum kit with horizontal bass drum, snare, cymbals, gongs and all kinds of scrap metal. His collaborators included David Chiesa, Frederic Blondy, Fabrice Charles, Bertrand Gauguet, Barre Philips, Jerome Noetinger, Martine Altenburgeer, Bertrand Denzler, Michel Doneda and many others.

Heddy Boubaker is one of the prominent and original saxophonist on the French improvised music scene. He started playing music on electric guitar, with time he switched to alto and bass saxophone. He played with numerous collaborators and at numerous festivals. He is very active in organizing concerts in Toulouse area. He also run his Un Rêve Nu label. Unfortuntaly since 2011 he had to stop all his saxophone practice and started playing analog modular synthesizer and electric bass.

The new WPB3 record, A Floating World, is the resulting product of one week of residency in Bordeaux in France. The goal was to have an intensive work, rehearsals and reflexion period on our music and to produce high quality recordings. This latest was achieved thanks to Benjamin Maumus which was not only the sound engineer - from GMEA Albi - but, for all that week, the 4th member of the band. He brought his personal perspective, a new external, personal point of view about the sound and the music and by the way he put in place the forest of microphones in the wide space of the OARA theater, the playing/recording/listening process permitted us to feel accurately all sounds, all nuances from the quietest to loudest one, in the natural resonant acoustics of the place.

One of the particularities of our trio is to highly take acoustics of the place into account bringing deepness, perspective and sharpening contrasts of our sound. In our previous record Poverb where a live recording in a Hamburg church, the natural reverberation of this huge space added a new dimension to the sound of the band and could have been considered as a 4th member.

WPB3 strongly claims an unconditional freedom of creation, an appropriation of the improvisation that does not freeze on a single existing aesthetic, which confidently and adventurously sits on deep and intense listening and based on sound archeology of each musician of the trio: Heddy Boubaker on saxophones, Mathias Pontevia on drums and on prepared piano Nusch Werchowska. WPB3 is an assembly of those radically free components, running on the improv sonosphere for the past six years, a rare length for a free improvisation band."-Mikroton

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