Langue Hybride

Description

Written and arranged in less than a month during thisquietarmy's musical residency at the Centre d'Expérimentation Musicale (CEM) in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region of Quebec. "The goal of the residency was to play an hour of music ready to be performed live, recorded, and filmed in front of an audience, which meant I had to write new music from scratch starting on day one there, with people I had never met or played with before," explains Eric Quach, speaking about the nature of the writing process. I worked with local session musicians assigned under contract with the music center where I did my residency. It turned out to be a mix of classical musicians who were used to playing only notated music and jazz/funk/rock musicians who were really in the "jamming" spirit. We had to find ways to push everyone out of their comfort zone in order to bridge the gap between open jazz improvisation and austere classical music, including my own! Working with multiple people at once while trying to compose the music, sort through improvised ideas, and blend everything together was incredibly overwhelming and intense. I had to do a lot of work outside of those jam sessions, listening to recordings and creating diagrams for structures and explicitly expressing the mood, patterns, and emotions I wanted in all the different parts. Thus, "Langue Hybride" also extends to musical and sonic languages. A nod to the hybrid of languages with which Quach grew up in Quebec, the title also refers to the hybrid of musical languages encountered during this residency involving musicians from different backgrounds such as jazz, metal, and classical, blending seamlessly with Quach's self-taught sonic experiments and improvisational style. The resulting album reflects the exploration of a wide range of genres, skillfully mixed with his post-drone vision as a rich, ambitious, and elaborate body of work.