Learning

Description

“At a concert, I show something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But there is no end. Of course, there is no end. Because I am music, and I am always there.” - Sophie Agnel Learning - Sophie Agnel’s debut solo album is like a darker, more physical version of her excellent ‘Song,’ released on Relative Pitch earlier this year. For the first time encasing her unique sound on vinyl, the album arrives as Agnel recovers from a brain tumor—a upsetting discovery that will force her back to the piano. This is a terrifying prospect, but Agnel has been here before, reorienting herself almost entirely away from her initial classical training over the last four decades of her career. “When I was young, I had a very good hearing, an absolute oriole. Later, I started making strange sounds with my piano, composing different styles of music. For example, I was more interested in sounds than in melody. I remember one day sitting in a shop trying to read Schubert’s scores and a light was humming very loudly. I couldn’t listen to my inner oriole—I couldn’t read the score. I was completely subjugated by the sound of the light. And I understood that something had changed. Ten years before, I could read without hearing the light. Now, I understood that my ear was completely different. I was more open to the sounds of life.” Born in Paris in the 60s, and playing piano with her parents as soon as she could stand, Agnel quickly grew tired of the classical world. What frustrated her was the strange disconnect between the piano’s framework and its keyboard—an odd boundary that seemed to form a kind of unspoken code of decorum. “The first thing I put inside the piano was a plastic cup. I had seen a few pianists do it: Fred Van Hove, for example, would put rubber balls in it. But what I didn’t like was the apparent lack of connection between the outside and the inside of the pianos.” If you see Agnel play today, the body of her piano is littered with fish cans, ping-pong balls, blocks of wood—sounds you won’t recognize. Having absorbed the language of the European avant-garde, Agnel is known for extracting the piano’s interior from itself by slipping her handbag inside. But these “strange sounds” don’t just come from Cage: they also share the poetic force of Cecil Taylor, and ‘Learning’ demonstrates that Agnel’s work on the piano keyboard is just as important as what she’s placed on its strings. The record reveals her ability to unleash a formidable mass of sound, then bring it back to a single clarifying note. With one hand, Agnel plays an 88-tuned drum kit, and with the other, a huge guitar—the LP oscillating between approaching trains, blues harmonica, and feedback. It is a resolute work, the result of a dedication to a wholly personal language of gestures, accumulation, and skillful reduction. “Perhaps at 80, I won’t need anything,” Agnel says in a recent film shot at her home. “I will do the same, but with one note and one finger. Perhaps that will be enough.”