The Squid's Ear Magazine


Jauniaux / Charles  / Mariage : L'amour (Ayler Records)

Three consummate improvisers--Catherine Jauniaux on voice, Xavier Charles on clarinet and Jean-Sebastien Mariage on electric guitar--met at la Muse en Circuit in Alfortville, France after touring, recording this authoritative version of their profound and extended work, which uses lyrics excerpted from Marguerite Duras' 1971 cinematic novel L'amour.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Catherine Jauniaux-voice, objects

Xavier Charles-clarinet

Jean-Sebastien Mariage-electric guitar


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UPC: 3473351400275

Label: Ayler Records
Catalog ID: aylCD-168
Squidco Product Code: 30541

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2021
Country: France
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded at la Muse en Circuit, in Alfortville, France, on December 16, 2016, by Pierre-Henri Thiebaut.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"At the instigation of Catherine Jauniaux, three musicians meet around a book by Marguerite Duras. Three invented characters inspire music, a pulse, a harmony... through their silhouettes, their relationships, their movements, the space in which they are standing, between the sea, themselves, and an idea of civilization.

A triangular composition that is formed, deformed and reformed, in accordance with the tides. Music that tells of the wandering of souls on the brink of existence.

Lines, dots, strata, melodies and hidden words, impacts shown, acoustic obviously, to meet in the simplest and best way: playing/being together. This trio does not fail to amaze us with the fluidity of its sound, its sentimental and human generosity and amorous conviction. Aren't voice, clarinet and guitar the perfect instruments to help us reach these dreams?

The trio was recorded by Pierre-Henri Thiébaut at the end of 2016 after having toured with this program in 2015 from Paris to Moscow via Draguignan, Berlin and Saint Petersburg. Then everyone resumed their journey, following other meetings, involved in other projects. A story on hold...

It was finally in 2020 that by mutual agreement and deploring this state of affairs, we entrusted the music to Pierre Etchandy so that he could finalize the sound and allow us to present it to a larger audience than the sole lucky ones having been able to attend concerts by the trio.

Which he did with great care and especially love, we're back to it. The story continues..."-Ayler Records



"L'amour begins softly, with lone and softly layered tones, decays, ringing, and other noises. It builds in intensity, still quietly. The extended tones fluctuate and stretch. A hiss comes into the left ear, coy squeaks into the center and a bowed(?) guitar persists in the right. The track shimmers and crackles. It heaves at points, before crumbling into a few phrases of carefully articulated French, then ceases.

Each of the eleven tracks on L'amour follows a different course, but the basic contours and certain elements - the hushed guitar of Jean-Sébastien Mariage, the extended clarinet of Xavier Charles, and the dynamics between the lyrics, all in French, and the experimental vocalizations of Catherine Jauniaux - bind them, as does the text that inspired this project. I do not know French, so the lyrics, all excerpts from Marguerite Duras' 1971 cinematic novel L'amour, are lost on me. Catherina Jauniaux's powerful delivery, however, is not. Indeed, I might even hear more of the inflections, the drags and stops, and the sonority than I would were the lyrics in a language I understood. This album, moreover, was recorded after the trio toured Moscow, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, and Paris, reconnecting these major cities in which French once dominated as a literal lingua franca potentially to audiences who, like me, were able to bask in the vocals as estranged and beautiful sound. I am not sure how far the point about reasserting French as a regional language of culture should be taken, but, if not the language itself, Jauniaux, Charles, and Mariage are certainly elevating the French experimental scene in some of the experimental hubs of Europe, and without watering it down with Anglicism.

The musicians of L'amour form an unconventional trio based on what seems to be an unconventional text. At times, its quiet dynamics remind me of some of the more variegated releases of Creative Sources and Insub. (In fact, it sounds to me like a more developed take on a spoken word, gurgly improv style that the Guez Trio, released years ago by Insub's predecessor netlabel, had experimented with.) That, of course, is not to detract from its distinctiveness. Indeed, although I recognize a lot of the elements on L'amour, I have not heard them combined and staged quite like this. If you know French, I imagine there are layers of meaning accessible to you that I simply cannot speak to. And if you do not, it is certainly enough to let the sounds speak for themselves."-Nick Ostrum, The Free Jazz Collective



This album has been reviewed on our magazine:

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Get additional information at The Free Jazz Collective

Artist Biographies

"Catherine Jauniaux is a Belgian avant-garde singer. She has been described as a "one-woman-orchestra", a "human sampler", and "one of the best kept secrets in the world of improvised music". Her solo album, Fluvial (1983) is regarded as one of her most accomplished works. She was married to the late American experimental cellist and composer Tom Cora.

Catherine Jauniaux began her career as an actress in Belgium at the age of 15. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, she sang with several experimental rock groups, including Aksak Maboul and The Work. In 1983 she teamed up with The Work's Tim Hodgkinson (ex-Henry Cow) in London to record her first solo album, Fluvial. Jauniaux and Hodgkinson wrote most of the tracks for the album, which are "imagined folk songs" that include elements of "contemporary art song, African singing, Native American legends, and alien nursery rhymes". The album centres on Jauniaux's voice with additional instrumentation by Hodgkinson, Bill Gilonis (The Work), Lindsay Cooper (ex-Henry Cow) and Georgie Born (ex-Henry Cow). AllMusic rated the album as "highly recommended, especially to fans of unusual female vocal art."

In the early 1990s, Jauniaux moved to New York City, where she became part of the Downtown music scene, performing with a number of musicians, including Fred Frith, Tom Cora, Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins, Butch Morris and Ikue Mori. Jauniaux founded the duo Vibraslaps with Ikue Mori and later married Tom Cora. In 1995 Jauniaux and Cora moved to Southern France where she continued performing with various European musicians, including Louis Sclavis, Heiner Goebbels, Otomo Yoshihide and Christian Marclay. Cora died in 1998.

Jauniaux works regularly with artists in the field of dance and film, and sang in Heiner Goebbels's opera, Roemische Hunde in Frankfurt in 1991. She is inspired by traditional music, both real and imagined, and her performances mix seriousness and humour. She explores sound, emotion, melody and abstraction, and her vocal improvisations range from "traditional French chansons to breathy folk to Dadaistic glossolalia"."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Jauniaux)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"The work of clarinetist Xavier Charles ranges from noise to electro-acoustic via sound poetry. He has played in numerous new music festivals in France and abroad. In his work with groups and collectives, he has also collaborated with Martin Tetrault, The Ex, Ingar Zach, Pierre Berthet, Axel Dörner, Ivar Grideland, John Butcher, Jacques Di Donato, Frédéric Le Junter, Otomo Yoshihide, Getachew Mekuria, Christian Wallumrod, Emmanuelle Pellegrini, Lionel Marchetti, Jean-Philippe Gross, Michel Doneda and Frédéric Blondy. Different collectifs (Dans Les Arbres, Ouie-Dire, ONCEIM, No Spaguettitti Edition, Chris Burn Ensemble, Atmosphérique). Currently his musical research ranges from performance on the clarinet to the installation of vibrating speakers, at the edge of improvised music, noisy rock and electro-acoustic sound. He's deeply involved in the music world as an organizer of the festival "Densités". "

-Xavier Charles Website (http://www.xaviercharles.com/index.php/presentation/)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Born in Paris in 1973 and raised in the middle class suburbs, it's on the clotheslines at the end of the garden that Jean-Sébastien Mariage gets introduced to the guitar, well before the transmutation of his BEPC in black Stratocaster, changed very quickly for the Gibson Les Paul he has not dropped since. At 17 and up to 23, he follows the improvisation workshops of the one he still considers today as his music master, Patricio Villarroel. From his brief stint at the Sorbonne, a musicology course, he will remember little more than having heard, during the acoustics lessons, recordings of songs by Amazonian Indians or Vatican bells : it is that at the same time, true musical adventure began - first professional experience at age 19 with a dance company, then meeting at 20's Frederick Galiay, bassist with whom he founded Chamæleo Vulgaris, and first concerts under the aegis of Instants Chavirés. He goes on concerts, then thinks it would be good for him to enter the concervatory (sic), since that's where you learn to play concerts : he studied classical guitar for six years , until the national contest in 2000. There followed a good twenty recordings and hundreds of concerts, solo or in various formations, stamped free improvisation, free rock, even free jazz or noise, with the greatest achievements of French and international improvisers - not to mention collaborations with dance (Karol Armitage or Yukiko Nakamura), theater, poetry and visual arts, but also with composers such as Rhys Chattam, Elianne Radigue, Stephen O'Malley, Frederick Galiay, Peter Ablinger.... In short, a journey is, according to, purist or monomaniac : there has never been, there is, and there will never, probably, that the guitar, he can only do that, but knows how to do everything with it - especially what he is the only one who can do, of course. To know : calmly, with authority, to emerge from the chaos a matter, whatever it is to accept it, to welcome it even, then conscientiously to work it, to polish it... but always to the maximum, and then to a blow of one make him make throat. Leave the earth. Tear the time."

-Inversus Doxa (http://www.inversus-doxa.fr/Biography?lang=fr)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Le Temps Lent 5:24

2. Le Triangle Se Ferme 3:54

3. De Meme Que Le Ciel 6:27

4. Nuit 4:41

5. Un Choc Sourd 3:35

6. Trois Jours 5:42

7. Le Soleil | La Marche Du Fou 5:16

8. Elle Dort 3:51

9. Les Yeux S'ouvrent | Ils Retournent Au Noir 4:37

10. Ils Se Taisent | La Lumiere Monte 0:42

11. L'aurore Exterieure 4:57

Related Categories of Interest:


Ayler Records
Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
European Improvisation, Composition and Experimental Forms
Trio Recordings
Guitarists, &c.
Unusual Vocal Forms
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