Noël Akchote
Soundpage(s)
French guitarist Nöel Akchoté has confounded critics since his earliest releases with his blend of swinging jazz, free improvisation, and art-song sensibilities. Soundpage(s) are going to do more to further that confusion despite the fact that this album is easily the finest and most consistent realization of Akchoté's musical vision to date. This is a conceptual work centered around the soundbites on television news. And as a result, our composer felt given the vast world of soundbites to criti…
Impro-micro-acoustique
Impro-Micro-Acoustique is a meeting across generations and genre. Composer Luc Ferrari, one of the progenitors of musique concrete and a pioneer of electroacoustic music, has previously written scores for improvising musicians. (One of these, 'Tautologos 3' -- in an explosive 1970 performance by Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble -- appears on an earlier Blue Chopsticks release.) But prior to Impro-Micro-Acoustique, Ferrari himself had never played the role of an improviser. Several years ago, Fe…
Adult guitar
Adult guitar is a startling anthology of twenty unreleased tracks from Noël Akchoté's first twenty-one years of recording. Adult guitar (it is twenty-one years, after all) is the first record to attempt to represent the breadth of Noël's music. The project began when Noël dumped ten hours of wonderfully heterogeneous archival recordings in the hands of David Grubbs, who served as project editor and created a number of pieces from the raw material of live recordings. The resulting collection incl…