Ubiquité

Description

Since their meeting within the Marseille group Dupain in 2015, Pierre-Laurent Bertolino and Gurvant Le Gac have been weaving a fascinating music, nourished by extremely visual improvisations and sensitive polyphonic melodies. One musician in Central Brittany and the other in Marseille, and yet music that is personal to them wherever they are. The sounds of the wooden transverse flute and the electroacoustic hurdy-gurdy cross paths, merge only to disperse again, flutter about, and take us into a hypnotic trance. The duo’s music is hybrid; an instrumentation drawn from world music, a process of musical writing based on modal improvisation specific to jazz, an arrangement approach connected to electronic music and electro-acoustic research. In their new repertoire, called 'Ubiquité', Bertolino le Gac push their musical hybridization a little further; Gurvant Le Gac extends his flute in contact with an MPC (sequencer, multi-effect sampler) and a search into delays, Pierre Laurent Bertolino explores the hurdy-gurdy in contact with effects pedals, saturation and a sampler. The acoustic material is diverted, extended and reworked through the use of machines; the sonic exploration of the instruments’ textures is at the heart of the creative process. The tracks on 'Ubiquité' are powerfully evocative, taking the listener from ethereal landscapes to metropolises with intense sonic flows. “The magic of this dialogue lies in the richness of the textures, in the polyphonic shape of the melodies, but above all in the spontaneity of their impulses, which exalt the exhilaration of wide-open spaces and the melancholy of foggy days.” --- Anne Berthod, TÉLÉRAMA ---. “their two clearly unbridled imaginations let loose and extraordinary sound palettes burst from their instruments and remarkable inspirations.” --- Ian Anderson, fRoots. ---. After rubbing shoulders with Sam Karpienia’s Occitan patter in the group Dupain, the Marseillais Pierre-Laurent Bertolino and the Breton Gurvant Le Gac flee toward more Celtic than Mediterranean lands: the first with his electroacoustic hurdy-gurdy, an instrument whose buzzing strings seem to imitate at times the bagpipe, at times the Jew’s harp; the second with his wooden transverse flutes, whose clear arabesques carry their enveloping reverie toward airy spheres. The magic of this dialogue lies in the richness of the textures, in the polyphonic turn of the melodies, which also draw from minimalist currents; but above all in the spontaneity of their impulses, which exalt the exhilaration of wide-open spaces and the melancholy of foggy days. Between medieval sounds and magnetic waves, nocturnal bourrées and strangely comforting thunder sounds, these shifting lights radiate like northern lights, suspended between two eras, between sky and earth. ---- Anne Berthod, TÉLÉRAMA ---. Sarband/L'Autre distribution.