Umlaut Festival 2024 - Umlaut records

Umlaut Festival is back on April 26 to 28 2024 at the Gare XP !

LA GARE XP : 18 Bd Sérurier, 75019 Paris / Open pricing, no reservation.

FRIDAY APRIL 26 – 20H30

VOUS – Revisited traditional songs

Olga Kozieł (voice), Maria Stępień (violin), Sébastien Beliah (double bass) Hannes Lingens (percussions)

Using the traditional songs of Poland as a starting point for improvisation. Finding a common territory that crosses the ages and pays no heed to maps and borders. Seeking to return to the primary song, the one that would have inspired all the songs. Going where instruments and voice become one. Taking as their starting point the musical dialogue begun over ten years ago between Olga Kozieł and Sébastien Beliah, the duo is now opening the door to invite Maria Stępień and Hannes Lingens.

Photo : @Wacław Szpakowski

CHACONNES – Chaconnes from yesterday and today

Yannick Guédon (voice), Amaryllis Billet (violin), composition by Jean-Sébastien Bach and Karl Naegelen

In this program, a piece for solo voice created for the festival is set against a great classic of the violin repertoire. Progressing slowly, following the breaths, whistles and harmonics. Allowing the listener time to weave in and out of the steps of an imaginary dance. Written in connection with Yannick Guédon’s sound territories, this polyphonic work for solo voice is centered on an exploration of harmonics. Amaryllis Billet performs the chaconne from Bach’s 2nd partitia, one of the great classics of the violin repertoire. The composer from Eisenach, as a true alchemist of the instrument, injected the violin with a multiplicity of voices that unfold over an obstinate bass – sometimes heard, sometimes implied… tracing like a dotted line along the listening.

Photo : @Thomas Bernardet

SBATAX + GROSS – Electrospirals

Bertrand Denzler (tenor saxophone), Antonin Gerbal (drums), Jean-Philippe Gross (electroacoustic device)

Sbatax (Denzler-Gerbal) invite Jean-Philippe Gross. At the crossroads of electronic and instrumental music, the three musicians focus on a persistent flow, feeding the speed of motifs and fragments that intermingle, superimpose, transform and reinject themselves to create cycles and spirals.

Photo : @Ignacio Dansillio @Greff

SATURDAY APRIL 27 – 20H30

JOEL GRIP & SEYMOUR WRIGHT – Tending, extending and ending standards

Seymour Wright (alto saxophone), Joel Grip (double bass)

Joel Grip, double bass and Seymour Wright, alto saxophone play as a duo. Tending, extending and ending standards.

STRANGE STRINGS – Umlaut string ensemble

Composition by Katt Hernandez
Amaryllis Billet, Sebastien Beliah, Pierre-Antoine Badaroux, Eve Risser, Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip, Olga Koziel, Maria Stępień, Bertrand Denzler, Manu Scarpa (string instruments)

In 1966, when the composer-thinker-pianist-conductor-poet Sun Ra spotted a motley collection of string instruments in the window of an antique shop, he conceived the idea of a composition that would be an “study in ignorance”. He bought all the instruments (European or non-European, plucked or bowed) and brought them to his musicians. By giving the musicians instruments that they did not master (they were mainly wind instrumentists), Sun Ra offered himself the possibility of unheard-of, raw music, liberated from the past and resolutely turned towards the future and the elsewhere. The tracks “Strings Strange” and “Strange Strange” on the album Strange Strings bear witness to this. Today, the Umlaut collective is commissioning the American violinist and composer Katt Hernandez to revisit this singular work, and to reflect further on history, notation, the spontaneous, the predefined and the sonic imagination.

RED DESSERT EXPERIENCE – Strange floor

Mélissa Hié (djembé, balafon), Ophélia Hié (balafon, percussions), Tatiana Paris (guitar), Emmanuel Scarpa (drums), David Merlo (basse), Eve Risser (piano) and guests.

Dancing, orchestral and red dessert in an Umlaut form

SUNDAY APRIL 28 – 19H00

RÉCIFS/ÉTOCS – Lounge trance

Composition by Joris Rühl
Joris Rühl, Léa Castello, Thibaud Tupinier, Alexandre Morard (clarinet)

With Étocs, Joris Rühl concludes a diptych devoted to the clarinet quartet that began last year with his first piece Récifs, where he creates a meticulous, hypnotic universe in which his taste for instrumental exploration combined with the temporal precision afforded by his video scores produce a thousand and one surprises for the ear. Récifs offers listeners a hypnotic experience, encouraging them to abandon themselves to a blurred perception of temporality for the duration of a twenty-minute voyage. Étocs consists of a series of five interlinked parts, lasting a total of around 30 minutes; this section extends the meditative experience, but the successive colours of these five moments will enliven the overall picture with greater vivacity. Each of these miniatures will explore a well-defined sound state distinct from the others, like so many etocs, these rocky protuberances close to the shore, whose figures – gradually revealed or retracted at the whim of the tides – are singular but which we know to be linked together within a coherent geological whole.

OCCAM XXII – Harmonic singing

Composition by Eliane Radigue
Yannick Guédon: voice

OCCAM XXII is part of the OCCAM OCEAN cycle, which includes solos, duets as well as orchestral pieces. Each piece is a moment of exchange and sharing between the composer and the musicians. Together, they seek a new, intuitive form of communication where no system of notation can be used. The instrument becomes a body whose resonance the musician explores from the minutest to the most intense, the broad spectrum of its vibratory undulations, ” from the great deep swells to the ripples of fine summer days “, says Eliane Radigue.

“My encounter with Éliane Radigue stems from our shared taste for the minute variation in timbre, but also for the stretching, the blossoming of a sound phenomenon into musical form. You could say that OCCAM XXII was born of an encounter nourished by attention. An attention to micro-variations in timbre, to harmonics floating above a fundamental, but also, beyond the sound, an attention to the situation as it is being created in the moment of the concert.” Yannick Guédon

Photo : @Eleonore-Huisse

SOLO IMPROVISATION – F# scordatura violin and (sometimes) voice

Katt Hernandez (violin, voice)

Katt Hernandez has been playing concerts of solo improvisation for many years, through an ever-developing moment-form of mad language culled from a massive variety of acoustic, electronic and outsider music from around and beyond the world.

GARENNE – Ball from the Massif Central

Clémence Cognet (violin and voice), Noëllie Nioulou (violin, cello and voice)

The Garenne duo was formed in 2008 under the name “Les Poufs à Cordes” following a meeting within the Les Brayauds association. The desire to work with the repertoire of musicians from the Massif Central appeared quickly and led to the creation of a ball. In 2013, Les Poufs à Cordes recorded their first album produced by AEPEM and recorded by Aurelien Tanghe. The album is the culmination of several years’ practice of a repertoire that has been tried and tested at numerous balls. They then proposed to the “D’en Haut” duo from the HART BRUT company that together they should create a concert repertoire based on the music of Auvergne and Gascony, and thus begin to explore new sound materials dedicated exclusively to concert music. In 2021, together with the groups Bourrasque and Bòsc, they founded the all female musicians collective LA CRUE, and changed their name from “Les Poufs à Cordes” to “Garenne”.