The Squid's Ear Magazine


Agnel, Sophie: Learning [VINYL] (Otoroku)

"Learning, Sophie Agnel's first solo LP, feels like the dark, physical inversion of her excellent Song which came out on Relative Pitch. Sinking her unique sound into vinyl for the first time, the LP arrives as Agnel recovers from a bra...
 

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Sophie Agnel-prepare piano, percussion

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UPC: 5056321698285

Label: Otoroku
Catalog ID: ROKU 045LP
Squidco Product Code: 36841

Format: LP
Condition: New
Released: 2025
Country: UK
Packaging: LP
Recorded live at Cafe OTO, in London, UK, on June 6th, 2023, and June 4th, 2024, by Billy Steiger.
Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

Artist Biographies

"If it's in Paris that Sophie Agnel was born in 1964, it is towards other sounding islands in the heart of a reinvented temporality that she dwells today, at the stern of a grand piano, an instrument that she turns into a real living & vibrating organism.

Classically trained, escaped from jazz (drawn away by the too strict treatment of harmony), Sophie Agnel boards the piano from every sonic angle this musical vessel can offer : keys, strings & board are simultaneously apprehended, in a mixed procedure (as we say of painting techniques) that would be understated if it was reduced to the cagian definition of the prepared piano. Considering the instrument - that she extends with several accessories, paper cups, balls or strings - as a poetic supplier of anamorphic textures, the musician takes it to be an equal match to the wider diversity of musical systems, whatever the craft they where conceived in (from physiological to electro-acoustic) ...

We would then no longer be surprised to notice her understandings with Michel Doneda and to find her to the side of the wet saxophone of Alessandro Bosetti, of the acoustified electric guitar of Olivier Benoit, of the voices of Catherine Jauniaux and Phil Minton, or the keyboard of Christine Wodraska...

The same seal of esthetic evidence marks all of her musical companionships, with this same taste, beyond the narrative, for the delicate sonic quests and blossoming of dimensions to which the auditor takes part through an active listening : in the heart of Jean Pallandre's phonographic worlds, of Jerôme Noetinger & Lionel Marchetti's small scale cinema, John Butcher or Axel Dörner's crimpy tissues, by the lovely machines of Erik M or Ikue Mori, the harmonico-stratospheric rustling of Stéphane Rives...

The originality of the research conducted by Sophie Agnel today leads her to develop, in solo or with significantly chosen companions, a most refined and highly poetic approach to sound that makes each of her concerts a moving construction filled with chiseled musical gestures, a soft and sumptuous irradiation."-Guillaume Tarche

-Sophie Agnel Website (http://sophieagnel.free.fr/biographie.html)
12/2/2025

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Track Listing:
Related Categories of Interest:

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Vinyl Recordings
Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
European Improvisation, Composition and Experimental Forms
Piano & Keyboards
Solo Artist Recordings

Search for other titles on the label:
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