The Cold Gates, for
Köner & Winderen - Cloître - Live Évreux 2014
En juin 2014, à l’invitation de Frank Dubois dans le cadre de L’Atelier(s), Thomas Köner et Jana Winderen ont donné un concert au cloître de la cathédrale d’Évreux. Les deux musiciens jouaient ensemble pour la première fois. Mike Harding a rapidement exprimé le souhait d’en publier l’enregistrement sur le label Touch. Thomas Köner m’a alors demandé de rédiger le texte qui accompagnerait la première sortie, numérique, de l’album. Ce que j’ai accepté avec plaisir. Depuis, l'album a été réédité, toujours par le label Touch, en CD.
Voici l’essentiel de ce texte, que j’avais rédigé directement en anglais. Je remercie Stéphane Abraham et Mike Harding pour les quelques heureuses corrections qu’ils ont su me suggérer.
The
Cold Gates
Both
Thomas Köner and Jana Winderen frequently explore a stage
of the grey area that is intensely cold, one as subject, the other as matter.
of the grey area that is intensely cold, one as subject, the other as matter.
These
methods are not so different. First because their expression often appeals to
the same global droning form, second because, by different means, they circumnavigate
a blank space.
It is not enough to know that frozen brushstrokes are used by Thomas
Köner and Jana Winderen to feel their collaborative sound painting. That night of June 2014 in
Evreux, Normandy, they fashioned together a very discreet and evolutionary
soundscape, which included mist, birds, slow – very slow – breathing, celestial
humming, rain… all of which integrate a panorama their common music designs, which
is not necessarily cold. The concert had to happen in a peculiar place, like an
island in the midst of town, a square garden-like space cornered between two parts of the ancient bishopric:
the cathedral itself and the bishop’s palace converted into the town’s museum
of art and archaeology. Around the box tree labyrinth and the lawn rectangles, hundreds of years old gothic
architecture and gargoyles were watching over an unusual sacred event: modern,
instrument-less, outdoor. Shortly before going on stage, Jana told me “It’s
really strange because I usually play in the dark”. Indeed, we were getting
close to the longest day of the year and the sky was still luminous. It was up
to the musicians to recreate a night before the real one fell, up to them to call it.
A
night, or maybe a dawn, a zone of passage for the light, the forms: a soil to
enhance imagination. It all began in the mist, vaporous powder and sizzling
waves, upon which birds songs appeared. No more is needed to create a fairy
tale-like invitation, an attraction to a forest of dim light beams, sometimes
scattered, sometimes dense. A three dimensional sound space over-impressed the
empiric one, and the eroded layers of drones penetrated in a vertical tide
pouring over the spectators. The garden and the passageways hosted a mesmerized
audience. Some remained still, some walked slowly in the stone corridors,
experiencing another penetration of the sound. Gently pounding, a thin aqueous
metal call slowly reshaped the light rays into a luminous hum, leading the
second half of the performance at the suburbs of figuration, the gates of
melody accorded to a deep and cool, cool breath.
Then
it was time for the birds to flock and sing a last song before flying away to
hotter places. It was time to contemplate the cold places to which the drones
had led. It was time to watch the slow motion of icebergs, mirrored in the real
sky by huge clouds moving to the same rhythm. We were at the border.
We
have to be cautious, while getting close to the doors of the absolute. Some of
us hum, some of us draw. A manner of digging a corridor towards the
unspeakable, and make it efficient in the empiric world. Some of us also
discover poems. Open, Sesame!
Denis
Boyer – La Ferrière sur Risle, July-August 2014.
http://touch33.net/catalogue/tone-51-thomas-koner-jana-winderen-cloitre.html
