Prune Bécheau lives and works in France (Dordogne). Classically trained on the baroque violin, she has distanced herself from a traditional approach in order to express her idiosyncratic range of glitch sounds using special bow pressure and angle techniques performed solo or collectively in Europe. She is a member of the bands Pancrace (Penultimate Press, 2017) and Urs Graf Consort (Synchronies / La République des Granges, 2016) in which she also sings and plays keyboards (organ, piano, synthesizer) as well as of the sextet La Peuge. She is also involved in sound theory and contextual installations here and there.
The album ”Stries ton, tripes et poils” is comprised of a series of pieces exploring microtonality and specific timbres produced through different usages of the bow, playing with the diverse relationships between horse hair and gut strings (pressure / angle / velocity of the bow, transversal / oblique / torsional frictions, etc). The music is neither fully written nor completely improvised. It breaks the integrity of sounds and sound sets through obsessive physical processes to the point of highlighting specific ritornellos – composed of overtones, undertones and “off tones”. This “geographical” approach of the concrete violin-object has been influenced by music as diverse as Bach and Wyschnegradsky, polyphonic Pygmy music and Inuit throat singing, the sound of birdsongs and frogs. – Prune Bécheau