hot off the press

Saxophonist Matthieu Metzger likes going beyond the traditional techniques associated with his instrument, notably thanks to his passion for electronic treatments – he's been designing real time transformation music software since he was a kid.

This 31-year-old investigator of musical genres loves to venture into dangerous territory. As well as being a fine jazz player/improviser and a member of the French ONJ (Orchestre National de Jazz), he's dipped into contemporary music, folk, rock, metal and mandingo.

Some of these compositions lurked in Matthieu's memory or his shelves, others were specially written for this occasion – the strange and exciting experience of planning an album. With no unity to justify, no tragic concept. As a matter of fact, it was all about the pleasure of cooking for you something abstract and joyful.

Who is blowing? Through what organic or manufactured matter? Who can stir up the glowing embers, swell the sails, carve the glass? Who can tame the air?

Tamers of gusts, surfers of atmospheric waves, explorers of windswept labyrinths, Géraldine Keller and Jean-Luc Cappozzo have over the last ten years devised a unique taming act, whereby they subject the ether to their every whim.

This album tells so much more than the intertwined stories of a windchaser who played jazz until he forgot the very notion of idiom, and a soprano with a background in contemporary music who readily immersed herself in the deep end of the moment.

On the red-hot thread of this friendship (or this love, call it what you want!) the duo whose stubborn search you are about to witness are like tightrope walkers without a safety net over a den whose lions, pacified, keep quiet…

Presenting the music of the sextet consisting of Marc Ducret (guitar), Antonin Rayon (piano), Sylvain Lemêtre (percussion), Matthias Mahler, Fidel Fourneyron and Alexis Persigan (trombones), which first performed in October 2011 and recorded in December 2012, a few weeks after the Tower-Bridge 12-piece orchestra had a tour of France and volume 4 was released.

Whereas the quintet from volume 1 and the quartet from volume 2 played selected pieces from the Tower 'repertoire', this ensemble plays comments on the music already played, either in the form of rewritten fragments or developments of excerpts/patterns, that give the music from the other two bands a new light, delivering all the harmonic or rhythmic keys to compositions previously heard in a radically different form.

This is the end of the cycle of releases which started exactly 2 years ago.
Or is it not? Who knows...