Three with Jean-Luc Guionnet

Jean-Luc Guionnet / Seijiro Murayama - Le Bruit du Toit

Xing Wu 4

Eric Brochard / Jean-Luc Guionnet / Edward Perraud – [on]

In Situ 241

Jean-Luc Guionnet / Toshimaru Nakamura - Map

Potlatch 108

For over a decade, Jean-Luc Guionnet has been an important if discreet presence in French new music, creating musique concrète (he studied with Xenakis), radiophonic projects and site-specific installations (often in the company of Eric La Casa), and improvising on alto saxophone in a variety of fields from high-octane free jazz to ultra-minimalism. [on], the latest offering on the bijou improv label In Situ, was recorded back in 2002 in Poitiers, and features local bassist Eric Brochard with Guionnet and frequent playing partner, percussionist Edward Perraud, in two extended tracks – entitled "Lithe" and "Néolithe" (abstruse track titles are a Guionnet speciality) – which find and follow a fine line between "traditional" improv's turn-on-a-dime development of individual musicians' motivic input and the stratified, laminal ensemble sound typical of post-AMM free music, best exemplified perhaps by Hubbub, Guionnet's quintet with Perraud, Bertrand Denzler, Frédéric Blondy and Jean-Sébastien Mariage. Events unfold at a leisurely pace, but there's an underlying tension from Brochard's lugubrious bass and Perraud's skillfully placed drumhead scrapes. He's also arguably the finest exponent of bowed metal since Eddie Prévost, and Brochard and Guionnet both pick up on the pitches of his crotales and cymbals, giving the music remarkable coherence and inner strength.

Le Bruit du Toit finds Guionnet in the company of another percussionist, Seijiro Murayama, on a windy afternoon in a temple in Mishima, Japan, in February 2007 – empty but for the occasional creaks of the roof, as the title implies – in a breathtaking study of sound and space. Unlike Perraud, Murayama is an exceptionally spare percussionist, often limiting his contributions to judiciously timed isolated hits on snare drum and cymbal. Along with Guionnet's exploration of single sustained pitches, gently inflected by multiphonics and subtle microtonal shifts, the music is as intense and uncompromising as Scelsi.
The first three tracks on Map were recorded just over a month later back in Paris, with another post-onkyo Japanese grandmaster, Toshimaru Nakamura on his customary no input mixing board. Nakamura's more abrasive sound world – he's come a long way since the almost danceable loops and pulses of a decade ago – pushes Guionnet further out into the world of so-called extended technique, which he's always been familiar with but has studiously avoided exploiting for its own sake, and the tension is palpable throughout. In addition to the alto sax, the Guionnet discography has on a number of occasions (Pentes, Tirets, Sion) explored the outer reaches of the venerable pipe organ, and the final track on Map finds him in the organ loft of a church in Parthenay, trading spine-chilling blasts of clusters with vicious screes of noise from Nakamura. Anyone who believes latter-day EAI lacks excitement and danger should be strapped down and forced to listen to this on repeat play for the rest of the year.

~ Dan Warburton