niagara: veneza

Recorded at the 2017 Venice Biennale, for the French Pavilion installation. Mixed by NIAGARA. Mastered and Lacquer cut at D&M by Helmut Erler, pressed on White Vinyl, limited to 200 copies. In 2017, we found ourselves quite unexpectedly on our way to Venice for three days, to participate in an installation created by Xavier Veilhan for the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale. We did not know exactly what we were going to do, nor how. We got there. The heat was brutal and the mosquitoes beastly. We had an excellent studio, really over the top. We picked a couple of instruments for each one of us, guided by not much more than intuition and serendipity, put all the stuff in the studio and started playing. The record you will hear (cut from 14 hours of music) is just that. Us playing; improvising for a bit and then asking Thibaut to hit record. People kept coming in, getting text messages, coughing, it’s all there in the mix. Actually, the long piano song (B3), was supposed to be nothing but a musical frame for the people walking around and looking at us making music, a way of including them. This, of course, only occurred on the second day, when we realised that people were inevitably part of the process, and also that Sara had access to a Grand Piano! So, we decided to open the record with the very presence of the room (A1). (There is this cello thing that is like a ghost: no one remembers who was playing it and there is no separate track for it. Whatever.) The first day was more rhythmic for some reason; I suppose the trip, planes + vaporetto, was still very much in our system. Also, we were trying to get our engines going for this thing. Tó was absolutely mesmerized with the Sh101, which made everything have this thick forward moving sound (A2, A3, A4). On the last day, we made this more reduced music. Before lunch, this more vernacular thing, an interplay of Dx7 and these other synched sounds (B1), and then, right before we left for our vaporetto a Buchla solo by me (B2) (If you listen carefully, at the tail end, you can hear Tó and Thibaut discussing how to send the files so we could mix it and do this record). 40+ minutes of music, not a live record, but also, only a studio record in a very very peculiar sense. Mastered and Lacquer cut at D&M, by Helmut Erler, pressed on White Vinyl, limited to 200 copies.