This event is included with the Friends of Reethaus Annual Pass.
The sculptor and visual artist Jeanne Briand is among the first generation of people conceived in vitro. This test tube origin left her with a lifelong obsession with glass. Glass, with its knack for taking on the fluid shapes of the body — intestines, organs, uteri — has appeared in her work in a number of guises since she first learned to blow it. Glass has been the guest material for a series of albums that she created with the composer Romain Azzaro.
For the first, A Gamete Glass Tale, Briand created a series of glass instruments which could be tapped, knocked, blown like the mouth of a bottle or filled with water and made to resonate. Glass, like shells, has a very particular sound from the inside. Briand and Azzaro recorded the music from various instruments through these crafted “gametes” to give birth to a rich progeny of sounds. In the second album, Gear(s), the concept was inverted: the sounds of the glass were passed through various electronic instruments to produce hard, industrial tones.
Gear(s) & Glass is the third act of their collaboration: in this denouement, the material is smashed. The shatter of glass contains an infinity of notes; it is a region of sound both poetic and mechanical. The splintering of glass of a spatial event. Azzaro captured these instants of rupture with omnidirectional microphones. Working at MONOM Studios, which, unlike most sound systems, is built, like human hearing, on omnidirectional sound space, Azzaro processed the broken glass into a spatial composition.
This August at Reethaus, listeners are invited to hear Gear(s) & Glass, the result of a ten-year collaboration and a study in shattering.