tomaga & pierre bastien: bandiera di carta

Bandiera Di Carta represents the ongoing collaboration between instrument builder and composer Pierre Bastien and the London based experimental duo Tomaga (Valentina Magaletti and Tom Relleen). Bastien has been called a "mad musical scientist with a celebrity following" by The Guardian (UK) having collaborated with the likes of filmmaker Pierrick Sorin, fashion designer Issey Miyake, singer and composer Robert Wyatt as well as Aphex Twin, who released three of his albums on his label Rephlex. Tomaga have made more than a dozen records since forming in 2014. They collaborated on the CAN Project with Thurston Moore, Malcolm Mooney, Deb Goodge, and others in 2017. The artistic collaboration between Pierre and Tomaga began with two commissions: from Fructose Festival in Dunkirk and the revered underground festival Supersonic in Birmingham UK. Recording initially at a studio in the industrial port of Dunkirk, the uneasy bond between borders and states seems to have been a theoretical motor to the collaborative sessions, as well as the bleak landscape of the seaport frontier. This inspiration found further manifestation in the cover image for Bandiera Di Carta. Resembling a white paper flag, it is, in fact, a photograph of Bastien's paper and air sound machine installed on stage at Teatro Carignano in Turin as part of the trio's performance there. This charged, ambivalent image of a blank flag evokes the transcendence of the national, a prescient visual motif that meditates on the contemporary uncertainty around notions of national identity and borders but perhaps also a "carte blanche" for the artists involved. For each piece, Bastien's unique sonic style: by turns his kinetic mechanoid motors, capriciously arrhythmic pipes, or the peculiar susurrus of paper, creates a world in which Tomaga introduce their musical palette. Magaletti's percussion anchors these sometimes chaotic forces into beguiling syncopations, with Relleen's synthesizer and organ work creating harmonic counterpoints and interruptive provocations, to which Bastien responds with lyrical turns on prepared trumpet, rubber band, tin foil, and bass ocarina. The results are curiously evocative of free jazz by the likes of Sun Ra or Art Ensemble of Chicago paired with the percussive sound worlds of artists like Francis Bebey or Muslimgauze along with unique and sometimes bizarrely exotic tonal landscapes of composers like Catherine Christer Hennix, Carl Stone, or Egisto Macchi. Mixed and mastered by Rashad Becker.