Ictus & Guests

With:

String quartet: Ictus Ensemble
Organ: Hampus Lindwall
Composers and pieces:

- Jürg Frey (born in 1953), String Quartet N° 2 (2000), with amplified voices
- Ellen Arkbro (born in 1990), Chordalities (2019), for pipe organ
- Hampus Lindwall (born in 1976), Brace for Impact (2020), for organ and string quartet

The Ictus Ensemble – which voluntarily describes itself as a contemporary music band and undertakes impressive collaborations with diverse artists, from Georges Aperghis and Joris Lacoste to Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker – has dreamed up a unique program for this Nomadic Night: a string quartet, an organ, three pieces. Spectators are invited for a sound exploration in each individual piece and the interactions among them.

For this concert, Ictus is bringing together an amplified string quartet as well as Jean-Baptiste Monnot’s modular “Travel Organ” – a monster in a kit composed of 350 pipes, developed with the help of an aeronautic engineer. The event features three exceptional composers infrequently seen in Paris: Jürg Frey, Ellen Arkbro and Hampus Lindwall. The word “minimalism” is evoked here, “but returned to its original radicality, a legacy of the 1960s, detached from the temptations of wellness music,” in the words of Ictus.

On the program:

Jürg Frey’s String Quartet N°2 – explicitly influenced by John Cage – is one of the most impressive works in contemporary minimalism. The music is as simple as it is radical, both sensitive and contemplative, in which a certain quality of silence prevails. But “the serenity of a sumptuous harmonic discourse doesn’t keep the music from slowly splitting in two, as though it were invaded by its shadow,” Ictus explains. This quartet uses strange bow techniques, leading each chord to resemble a long breath that mingles with the murmuring voices of the singers, making for a clamorous silence.

The young composer Ellen Arkbro proposes sound experiences that linger in the memory. “It’s gaseous, wonderful music that lets your mind shape it as you please, like watching big clouds and discovering dinosaurs,” Pitchfork has said of her work. Combining classic modernism, studio electronic and experimental club music, in her work she looks to intervals in harmony and seeks out accuracy of intonation. As Ictus describes, “minimalism as practiced by Arkbro always evokes a certain psychoacoustics dimension: bare chords, distended in time, grainy in texture, lead to the emergence of a world of random micro-details and physical disturbances”. Her music sounds at once highly modern and archaic, slightly abrasive and completely trippy. Her piece Chordalities, centered around four long, sustained organ chords, plunges us into an extended musical tracking shot, attentive to a body of sound in perpetual evolution.

Brace for Impact by Hampus Lindwall – groundbreaking composer and virtuoso organist who regularly collaborates with artists such as Cory Arcangel and Mauro Lanza – combines string quartet and organ for one last musical round. In this new version of the piece inspired by 1990s heavy metal and techno cultures, the saturated electric guitars are replaced by strings. This last piece is a face-off between organ and strings, Brace for Impact!