A poetic odyssey on solo piano.
This recording seems at times like a pause, in the context of a musical journey rich with encounter and adventure, from Sonny Murray to Dominique Regef, passing by Helen Labarrière, Guillaume Orti and even also Michel Doneda, Michaël Nick, Hélène Breschand, Thierry Madio, eRikm, etc.
As alone as any pianist, before her terrible machine of strings and keys and faced with a story charged with dramatic moments and personalities, Sophie Agnel has produced a poetic odyssey that goes far beyond a show of technique.
This recording is a moment of discovery in sound; a must in the saturated space of today.
"If it's in Paris that Sophie Agnel was born in 1964, it is towards other sounding islands in the heart of a reinvented temporality that she dwells today, at the stern of a grand piano, an instrument that she turns into a real living & vibrating organism. Classically trained, escaped from jazz (drawn away by the too strict treatment of harmony), Sophie Agnel boards the piano from every sonic angle this musical vessel can offer : keys, strings & board are simultaneously apprehended, in a mixed procedure (as we say of painting techniques) that would be understated if it was reduced to the
cagian definition of the prepared piano. Considering the instrument—that she extends with several accessories, paper cups, balls or strings—as a poetic supplier of anamorphic textures, the musician takes it to be an equal match to the wider diversity of musical systems, whatever the craft they where conceived in (from physiological to electro-acoustic) ... We would then no longer be surprised to notice her understandings with
Michel Doneda and to find her to the side of the wet saxophone of
Alessandro Bosetti, of the acoustified electric guitar of
Olivier Benoit, of the voices of Catherine Jauniaux and
Phil Minton, or the keyboard of
Christine Wodrascka... The same seal of esthetic evidence marks all of her musical companionships, with this same taste, beyond the narrative, for the delicate sonic quests and blossoming of dimensions to which the auditor takes part through an active listening : in the heart of Jean Pallandre's phonographic worlds, of
Jérôme Noetinger &
Lionel Marchetti's small scale cinema,
John Butcher or
Axel Dörner's crimpy tissues, by the lovely machines of
eRikm or Ikue Mori, the harmonico-stratospheric rustling of Stéphane Rives... The originality of the research conducted by Sophie Agnel today leads her to develop, in solo or with significantly chosen companions, a most refined and highly poetic approach to sound that makes each of her concerts a moving construction filled with chiseled musical gestures, a soft and sumptuous irradiation."
Guillaume Tarche
