A MUSICAL AND VISUAL COLLECTION

Collection AVEC on the record label Cypres is the fruit of the meeting of the creative worlds of the composer Pierre-Adrien Charpy, the soprano Raphaële Kennedy and the photographer and video artist Isabelle Françaix; it develops a collaboration in which music and image express themselves in a common space that encourages metamorphosis. It enables new creations to live alongside Early Music and folk music : interlacing textures, stratifying memory, dialoguing between different artistic disciplines. Collection Avec opens up new ways of listening, taking the listener off the beaten track, sign-posted by Didier Lamare‘s words. The Belgian record label Cypres crosses many frontiers around the shared dream of three French artists and a raconteur.

At a time when the CD object is disappearing in favor of the unique sound object, directly accessible via the net, the new AVECypres collection attempts an alternative that would be the squaring of the circle: inserting a musical proposal – particularly abundant in this case – in a bundle of artistic objects in close connection with the central proposal and, themselves, accessible, in whole or in part, via the universal cloud.
La Libre Culture, Martine D. Mergeay, 2017

CREATIONS

Kaija Saariaho | Jean-Baptiste Barrière
Blu-Ray & CD box set Ekstasis
Aliisa Neige Barrière | Camilla Hoitenga | Raphaële Kennedy | Design and realisation of the images, electronics and final mixing, electronics realisation : Jean-Baptiste Barrière | Video processing : Pierre-Jean Bouyer et François Galard | Video shooting, editing and color grading : Isabelle Barrière | Technical conception and supervision : Image Auditive | Engineering, editing, vocal and instrumental sound mixing : David Lefeber / Metier Productions | Electronics realisation : Thomas Goepfer | Booklet notes : Didier Lamare | Translations : Paul Willenbrock | Digipack’s pictures and booklet’s cover : Jean-Baptiste Barrière | Booklet’s photographs : Isabelle Françaix | Graphic design : Luc Van de Velde | Interviews moderated by Pierre-Adrien Charpy, directed by Isabelle Françaix
AVECypres 02 / CYP2624

Sensory correspondences, displacement of the imagination, reversal of perspectives: it is to a similar experience that ekstasis invites you, a musical recording and multimedia object built by sound and image around six works by Kaija Saariaho and Jean-Baptiste Barrière. The complementarity of their creative paths, living together and often working in the same way, draws the quite precise organization of the work presented in this album. Prima la musica, dopo la visione… The three works of Kaija Saariaho are musical compositions, sound constructions, acoustic and electronic, pre-existing the vision of her husband. Jean-Baptiste Barrière’s three pieces were conceived as multimedia works, and first of all for the visual concert, with lines and rhythms that are perhaps more direct, leaving open spaces to receive the images. The object is both a premiere and, if not an assessment, at least a look at twenty years of multimedia work by Jean-Baptiste Barrière on music, and especially around the visual concert. Fixed for the first time on a high definition support, with a maniacal care given to the calibration, the editing, the breaths, the creation is freed from the vicissitudes of the stage to face other constraints.
Didier Lamare

An intoxicating Blu-Ray puts into sound images « six visual concerts » by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and the French composer-video artist Jean-Baptiste Barrière.
L’Echo, Stéphane Renard, 2019

Ekstasis box, a precious and unusual object.
A sensory journey that accompanies a music that is just as much.
Le soir, Gaëlle Moury, 2019

[…] The three works by each composer have the same propensity for intimate confidence. Saariaho’s works (written in the 1990s) show an exceptional quality of deployment. Nocturne’s spidery weave, NoaNoa’s spatialized amplification and Lonh’s enchanting revolutions. More recent (2003-2014), those of Barrière (the twirling Crossing the Blind Forest, the bewitching Violance and the penetrating Ekstasis) reveal a taste for the projection of the vocal or instrumental gesture which, even before viewing the Blu-ray coupled with the CD (same program, with images), ensures that the musician doubles as an authentic director.
Le Monde, Pierre Gervasoni, 2019

Three musicians are united here: flutist Camilla Hoitenga, faithful to the mazes of the two composers; violinist Aliisa Neige Barrière, their daughter, whose physical and musical presence diffuses a venomous enchantment; soprano Raphaële Kennedy, in a silver-tipped incarnation which, in our opinion, imposes the reference versions of the two vocal pieces.
Valeurs actuelles, L. L, 2019

Buy the physical box-set (Cypres records)

Order by mail to the producer (Da Pacem)

Buy the dematerialised form (vimeo AVECypres)

Some sorts of music can sound like delicate lithographs, others like large frescoes. The pieces presented in the first volume of this album belong to the composer’s collection of jewellery, his etchings, his small-scale works with the delicate wash of the watercolour or the precise impasto of the paintbrush. The second volume unfurls in one breath a concert-work which is nothing less than a panorama painted on fresh plaster, depicting an almost hallucinatory voyage in which the listener is invited to dance just as much as to meditate. This hour of music, a sequence of baroque, contemporary and traditional music, forms an innovative opening to the music of our time, into which some will venture who would otherwise never have dared.
Didier Lamare

His is an organic multifaceted music, through which run visible strata and unsuspected crevices, enlivened by surface currents and subterranean flows. […] His music is that of today, neither modern nor post-modern – often a music of the sea, always of open spaces, of zoom and of wide-angle, of sensations, of emotions. And his composition is free from the dogmas […].
Didier Lamare, 2017

The album is a success on the visual level – signed Isabelle Françaix for the photos and Luc Van de Velde for the graphic design – and just as much on the literary level, thanks to the captivating (and not without humor) texts of Didier Lamare, who guides the reader through a program […] of exceptional richness and diversity. At the heart of the matter, the Frenchman Pierre-Adrien Charpy, […] prolific, imaginative and free composer, whose each work presented here is the fruit of a particular alliance and, therefore, of a particular inspiration. At the top of the list are those that unite him with his companion […] the soprano Raphaële Kennedy.
La Libre Culture, Martine D. Mergeay, 2017

At the beginning, a long and sinuous melody for the voice of Raphaële Kennedy […]! It is the abandonment of the bodies that we hear, with the sensual breath of the soprano, the obstinacy of the rhythms, the suspension of the scintillating percussions, the backwash of the sea… […] vast sound world imagined, between 2001 and 2015, by a composer as much impossible to circumvent as talented […]! In « Sillages », we discover sound dialogues mixing traditional textures with electronics, invitations to travel to familiar and unheard-of places […]. Mixed pieces that reflect Pierre-Adrien Charpy’s openness to historical, geographical and stylistic worlds, full of sensuality, light, animated, powerful and voluptuous.
Zibeline, Jacques Freschel, 2017

Pierre-Adrien Charpy, […] escaped from the chapels, [is] concentrated on the essential: to breathe, to feel, to transmit. From Marseilles, he is a solar and maritime musician. The photographs illustrating the boxed set bear witness to this universe of deep waters and iridescent lights that is easy to spot in most of his pieces. Intellectual, that is to say that knowledge is not a disgrace for him, sometimes mystical, he discreetly uses in his work the accumulated layers of Western culture […].
Valeurs Actuelles, Lionel Lestang, 2017

With the composer Pierre-Adrien Charpy, there is […] a whole memory of music that emerges […]: it is the very density of a rich sound layer nourished in depth by a past in the present of modernity.
Le blog-note de Benito on radio dialogue RCF, Benito Pelegrín, 2017

Buy the box-set (Cypres records)

Order by mail to the producer (Da Pacem)

Isabelle Françaix
Movie Vivante morte éblouie
Raphaële Kennedy | Image : Isabelle Françaix | Music : Pierre-Adrien Charpy | Sound : David Lefeber | Producer : Hervé Alexandre – Matsylie Productions

A woman reappropriates her image in the abandonment of love. In the heart of intimacy, two beings discover the freedom that connects them to the beat of the world. What if, in the wilderness, we could rediscover the simple and obvious beauty of our humanity?

[…] out of the ordinary and luminous […]. Everything is light, body, nature and voice.
La Libre Culture, Martine D. Mergeay, 2017

CONTACT

Collection AVECypres
Contact : dapacem1901@gmail.com
Blog : collectionavec.canalblog.com

Pierre-Adrien Charpy & Raphaële Kennedy
producers
Phones : +33 (0)6 63 63 68 53 / +33 (0)6 60 92 25 62
contact@pierreadriencharpy.com
contact@raphaelekennedy.com