This composition is a kind of false diary of the year 2015, or rather a real concentration of that year’s memories with very little rationality in its hierarchies, its ordering, or in the connections it makes. The narrative, if one wants to hear any, comes from the meeting between chronologies, the shape of the snippets, the fortuitous accidents and such, yet all in the absence of any sequential logic. The idea of building a form of sound by gambling with memories had been turning and returning around me for a while, as if one could place some remains of the past like bets on the green felt of a casino of forms : placing a bet on yesterday for tomorrow, shaping a kind of sonic boli*, a boli dreamt, a boli fantasized — a form to come. What is the form of a shapeless boli, one that’s full of memories, yet resembles nothing ? Conglomerated in a form, an object, things, dust, substances, and other bloods of the kind that the past rendered important, and that the work amalgamates and mashes together.

In the end Tournures Cessent is none of these… neither diary, nor boli, brushing against both, but still standing elsewhere, in the end forming a triangle with them : rather than the compact and opaque amalgam of the boli, or the daily order of the diary Tournures Cessent surrenders to the drift, the transparency, the line, and to a few words, sometimes clear — all from memory.

Jean-Luc Guionnet is a Parisian artist whose practice encompasses composition, improvisation, filmmaking, and philosophy. He has toured extensively as a solo saxophonist, and has spent the past 15 years performing on historic church organs around the world. For him, music is one of many methods by which to test reality. Having studied musique concrète under Iannis Xenakis, his acousmatic sensitivities reveal themselves through the reverence that guides these interrogations. Approaching his instruments as imperfect vehicles of artificial intelligence, his attentive engagement applies speculative pressure to the expressive limits of their material properties. In his hands, design flaws and repressed qualities transform into catalysts for novel sonic emanations, and the simplest of processes are mobilized to extract infinitesimal acoustic detail. Although a formidable solo performer, Guionnet is no stranger to collaboration. In addition to his ongoing relationship to the seminal French improvisation group Hubbub, he has worked extensively with artists such as Taku Unami, Eric La Casa, Toshimaru Nakamura, Will Guthrie, and Mattin.

"My musical work subdivides itself into as many ways as occasions arise for me to think and act with sound and forms. Those occasions have always to do with a strong meeting with an outside element : an instrument (saxophone/organ), a theoretical idea (what is "rumour"?), and mainly a collaborating friend (Lotus Edde Khouri, Éric La Casa, Thomas Bonvalet, Seijiro Murayama) ... or the long term adventure of a team (Hubbub, Ames Room, Jupiter Terminus ...). There then follows a collection of themes which, in turn, influence the evolution of the musical work and define the direction of meetings to come: the thickness of the air, the pidgin, the musical instrument considered as affective automaton, sound as a signature of space, signature of objects, signature of what it is not... The coming emotion is made out of all these strata and the sliding of one over the other during the act of listening. When music is giving time."