Le UN
“25 pièces sans vide”

3 CDs providing an overview of Le UN’s work through improvisation in large ensembles (CD1 & 2) in different acoustics, improvisation in small and medium-sized ensembles (PME), and outdoor performances in public spaces (brigade d’intervention légère).
Le UN was started in 2012 at the initiative of David Chiesa. In 2019, the team was renewed to concentrate solely on what is known as free or non-idiomatic improvisation. Key principles being: no recourse to any sort of score or direction, and improvisation considered not as a style or genre but rather as an attitude to music making. Improvisation also poses questions about the ephemeral and impermanence: the music leaves traces, and not proof.
There are 25 of us, including a light artist and a performer. We play on different stages in different venues or theatres, and we also adapt to exhibition spaces, and we sometimes even invent “devices” that bring improvisation to the fore. We are increasingly attracted to playing with ideas beyond that of the traditional stage, to where the ensemble can be conceived as an ecosystem, taking as starting points ethical notions (the links between us, our rapport with the world and the environment, our choices of self-organisation…) and aesthetics (accepting or taking responsibility for the contradictions in our own practices, interrogating improvisation in all its components, and questioning the practice of the frontality of performance…). We venture into contexts that throw us, like playing on the street, on a river, in caves, in acousmatic situations with speaker projections, etc. We confront our sounds, our ephemeral discourses with all manner of surveying. Without quite knowing where we are going, we think that walking, breathing, feeling, looking, also speaks to a place that is rightly musical.
With Sophie Agnel, piano, Pascal Battus, rotating surfaces, Claire Bergerault, accordion and voice, Benjamin Bondonneau, clarinet, Christophe Cardoen, light apparatus, Patrick Charbonnier, trombone, David Chiesa, double bass, Michel Doneda, soprano saxophone, Camille Emaille, percussion, Nina Garcia, electric guitar, Amanda Gardone, double bass, Bertrand Gauguet, alto saxophone, Anouck Genthon, violin, Rozemarie Heggen, double bass, Benoit Kilian, percussion, Soizic Lebrat, cello, Lionel Marchetti, electronics, Michel Mathieu, actions, Natacha Muslera, voice, Jérôme Noetinger, electronics, Jean-Luc Petit, bass clarinet, sopranino saxophone, Christian Pruvost, trumpet, Dominique Regef, hurdy- gurdy, Aude Romary, cello, Mathieu Werchowski, violin and viola.