Off - Record label
OVD055 : Pierre Vervloesem - Eric Thielemans / Masterpieces Of Irish Folklore, Vol. 12
Some music by Belgian Jazz drummer Eric Thielemans and avant garde wizard Pierre Vervloesem for your pleasure! Enjoy!
Digital release on the 25th of January 2022.
Track listing:
Cover art by Camille Tsering
ODG155 : Sylvain Van Iniitu / Sylvain van Iniitu ~plays Django Reinhardt
Sylvain about his album:
"To be honest, I was not a fan of Django Reinhardt at first. His untouchable iconic status, his guitar virtuosity emulating hordes of followers eager to imitate him to the nearest note, the emphasis on speed and dexterity in his playing : all this was enough to put me off from the start. While the guitar was my first instrument, I almost instantly turned to the opposite path: saturation, approximation, obscurity, experimentation, slowness. In short, a dead end.
Twenty years later, a few good lessons learned along the way, I finally discovered the man behind the music, and it is above all this that pushed me to listen again, differently. First of all, to be touched by the story of a precociously gifted musician, who lived through a catastrophe that completely incapacitated him (let's remember that at 18, he was seriously burned in a fire in his trailer and lost the use of two fingers on his left hand) and who somehow found the strength to completely reinvent his playing: not only to find, compensate, but finally to surpass what he had previously achieved. Then, to become aware that this musician did not live alone, but in a community of friends, of encounters, and in his discovery through various encounters of jazz, to take the measure of his instantaneous capacity to assimilate and syncretize a new music.
In the meantime, I stopped playing guitar and spent the last few years developing a sequencer that I tell myself is "home-made", but in fact owes a lot to an invisible community : the one that develops microcontroller technology, makes software available online to everyone, describes in tutorials how to let them drive synthesizers and expanders through the MIDI protocol. A sequencer in which I have been implementing for years routines that give a lot of space to chance, but which also define the limits within which it can play freely. In this case, this machine allowed me, from a digitization of Django Reinhardt's pieces, to use fragments of them, and to vary them as I pleased, with a bit of hazard. In all this, who is the author of what you will hear ? Django, the Technique, the programmers who ensure the intermediate stages of digitization, those who built the instruments, me?
Usually associated with a whole guitar mythology, some of Django Reinhardt's pieces are here translated into completely synthetic versions, with the help of a home-made sequencer, whose playing parameters can be randomly modified. A way to explore transformations, processes, limits of legibility and recognition, a mise en abîme of virtuosity through technique, an apology of simulacrum and infinite transformations, of the recycling nature of creativity, a passage from the burnt hand that plays to the incapable hand that codes...
A path of wandering between creative fire and cold technical complexity, I hope it will take you beyond the disfigurement to find a familiar figure in a new light."
Sylvain van Iniitu:
Born in 1976 in Ath. In the mid 90's his main interest was focused on collage, using various processes to corrode and disintegrate fragments of paper, already verging towards the limits of perception and meaning. In the next decade, shifting his focus to music, he started recording and experimenting with sound fragments, field recordings and crude, mostly second-hand or broken instruments, as well as free softwares. From 2008 on, he ran the music label ini.itu, also designing the sleeves of most vinyls. In the winter of 2013 he launched the E42.A8 sessions, based on improvisation in a remote area in the countryside. About the same period, starting to develop his own MIDI sequencer, and out of the need of visualising transformations brought by algorithms, he was paradoxically led again to the visual arts, augmented by the know-how of now being able to develop his own homemade graphic softwares. His main interests now lie in the themes both visual and auditory of processual transformations, (un)readability, interactions between form and meaning, alterations of alphabets, texts and scores, including braille and MIDI files! www.iniitu.net
Cover art by Domenico Solazzo
OPN001: Domenico Solazzo's PaNoPTiCoN / Live @ Biouel Barge
Cover art by A.L.
OPV017 : Pierre Vervloesem Group / 30 Years of Success
Dave Lynch about the album:
Heavy Medal
"It’s fairly safe to assume that the Order of Leopold II medal displayed on the album cover of the Pierre Vervloesem Group’s January 2022 release 30 Years of Success is intended to make an ironic statement. After 30 years creating a massive discography of audaciously outside-the-box music, Belgian electric guitarist Vervloesem probably does deserve some sort of medal pinned to his lapel as a signifier of “success.” In today’s music-consumption world however, he’s unlikely to have amassed the necessary hundred billion streams or downloads, and he’d also likely need to fit into a commercially recognized stylistic category rather than putting his own unique spin on nearly every style imaginable.
So never mind a narrow little “Best Fusion Guitarist” medal for Pierre: he's too all-over-the-map, thankfully in a good, Vervloesem way and not a horrific, Leopold way. During these Covid times, the guitarist’s engineering and multi-track arranging and mixing skills in home studio isolation, not to mention his mastery of MIDI technology, have enabled him to release (once per month during 2021!) digital albums influenced by everything and everyone from Indian tala music to TV soundtracks to world folkloric dance to vintage electronica to “fourth world” trumpeter Jon Hassell.
But, maybe now in particular, it might be fun to slam out some blistering jazz-rock-prog-metal-improv-whatever with a real live band — always an important thread in Vervloesem’s career anyway — and put said band through its paces in the studio and on tour (as safely possible as the pandemic drags on). Hence 30 Years of Success: both a career-retrospective album and a potential core live set for the Pierre Vervloesem Group.
The 14 instrumental tracks (including two bonuses for the digital version) revisited on 30 Years of Success reveal that the album is actually a ten-plus-year retrospective more than anything, with Vervloesem’s hard-edged quartet — featuring the guitarist joined by saxophonist Bruno Vansina, bassist Nicolas Dechêne, and drummer Renaud Van Hooland — mainly tackling tracks from 2019’s Artiste International and two “band” offerings (both of which also featured Vansina): 2014’s Undeletable by the Simple quartet and 2010’s Sketches of Pain by the Caca octet. (Pierre subsequently re-released the latter two albums in remixed editions.)
For one choice track, “Nullo Problemo,” the album does leap all the way back to 1994. That’s when, with Pierre already kicking up dust as guitarist for Peter Vermeersch’s manic avant jazz-rock outfit X-Legged Sally (beginning with 1991’s Slow-Up), he pulled a few XLS members into his personal orbit and stepped out with Home Made, an energetic, tuneful, yet diversely exploratory solo debut that charted some of the directions he would build upon in the years and decades to follow. Home Made’s original version of “Nullo Problemo” was a multi-sectioned and ultra-tight mini-epic, and it’s brought into even sharper focus here, beginning with Pierre’s sprightly, hand-muted melody before careening through abrupt tempo shifts, blasts of dissonance, guitar-sax tandem themes and inspired solos, all executed with the skill of seasoned musicians joining together as a single-minded unit on the same precise wavelength.
Undeletable was one of Pierre’s most amiable outings, and featured him on bass rather than guitar. The album’s four tracks heard here, starting with opening salvo “Belgian Triumphalism,” provide the guitarist an opportunity to cut loose with spiraling, noisy, spacy, and sometimes fearsomely incendiary fretwork absent from the 2014 originals, pushed along by the more hard-rocking rhythm section of Dechêne and Van Hooland, whose contributions to Vervloesem’s world date back to the mid-aughts when the twosome dug a sharp and solid foundation for 2005’s Rude.
The five tracks from 2010’s Sketches of Pain shift the emphasis from that album’s XLS-flavored horn section accents and punctuations (which included Vansina on blurty baritone sax) to the current quartet’s more compact sonic footprint, while sacrificing neither the Caca lineup’s multi-saxophone power nor “Schizoid Man” tightness on the herky-jerky insanity of a track like “Zgrol.” But the medal for sheer heaviosity goes to “Exposé,” with its insistent slow rhythmic pound, Zappa-esque guitar-sax unison theme, and screaming signal-split crescendos. Vansina is a lesser presence on the three tracks from Artiste International, the 2019 Vervloesem solo outing that also featured Swedish drummer Morgan Ågren (Mats/Morgan Band). The tunes hint at the studio tweakage of the originals, but not to the detriment of their live-wire immediacy fitting comfortably amongst the other tracks of 30 Years of Success — in fact, Pierre’s burning, soaring solo on “Chapatta” is a highlight of the entire collection.
At the time of this writing, it’s impossible to foretell whether some doomsday variant will send music fans back into their hermetically sealed life pods to enjoy their favorite pastime via tiny speakers stuffed into their ears. Hoping for the best, though, fans of no-holds-barred medal-worthy guitar heroism are advised to scan their local arts & entertainment calendars for possible appearances by the Pierre Vervloesem Group. A live-music opportunity not to be missed! And whenever we might find ourselves locked down in claustrophobic interior spaces, at least we might hope that Pierre Vervloesem will keep churning out a globe-trotting array of boundary-ignoring musical adventures, so that we can embark on journeys into previously unexplored regions…if only in our minds."
Dave Lynch - August 2021.
Pierre Vervloesem :Guitar
Bruno Vansina : Sax, Synth
Nicolas Dechêne : Bass
Renaud Van Hooland : Drums
Physical and digital release on the 21st of January 2022.
Track Listing:
1: Belgian Triumphalism
2: 2 Degrees
3: Brajil
4: Exposé
5: Mental Mento
6: Hop Hop Hop
7: Low
8: Twist
9: Nullo Problemo
10: One Of These Doris Day
11: Zgrol
12: Wobeling
13: Chapatta - Bonus track
14: Deliver us from the Aliments - Bonus track
