Leila Bordreuil ⟡ Imberbe

Other 12€

Thursday 24 September · 21:00

Cellist Leila Bordreuil presents a concert crossing improvisation, noise, and contemporary composition, including pieces from her recent works 'not an elegy' and 'Geophonics'.

French-American artist based in Brooklyn, Leila Bordreuil has been disenchanting approaches to the cello that, without spreading into mere mimesis of extended techniques, stretch from the instrument's countenance to dronescape landscapes and visceral eruptions of noise, welcoming in that passage through fire all kinds of materials and possibilities. A collaborator with names such as Laurel Halo or Bill Nace, Bordreuil has convincingly traversed the interstices and knots between improvisation, contemporary composition, and noise in patient work, lived with equal planning and commitment. And feeling. Largely discarding the use of pedals and other electronic resources, she anchors to the instrument, to its body, strings and resonances, to the surrounding space and to a meticulous amplification process the foundations for a music that both asserts its acoustic potential, La Brute, and explores a living sonic spectrum of resonances and harmonics, Headflush, or lets itself be carried into a melancholy that both turns in the forge of fire music and in a tense liminal suspension, i.e. the two pieces of the very, very recommendable 'not an elegy'. More recently, 1991, Summer, Huntington Garage Fire, released by Aaron Dilloway's Hanson, gives itself absolutely and almost tactilely to noise and evocative passages, as if rescued from the mist of memory. Beautiful. Geophonics, to be released these days on Superior Viaduct, opens a new window onto this process, captured in the immediacy of the moment, unrepeatable: circular cello feedbacks via amplifier in physical contact with a grand piano, which in reaction to sound resonates its strings, in a hypnotic and shifting flow. BS.