Gil SANSÓN / Lance Austin OLSEN
“Works on Paper”

Venezuelan-based composer/artist Gil Sansón and Canadian-based composer/painter Lance Austin Olsen began to work closely together via long distance in 2014. Their collaboration initially began when Olsen painted the CD cover of Sansón’s release ‘Immanence, A Life’ (Makam 003) in 2015. Sharing a similar aesthetic in art and music with deep respect and understanding of each other’s work, the two soon started to make music in collaboration through realizations of each other’s graphic scores or paintings.

Their first collaborative piece ‘A Meditation on the History of Painting (2017)’ was published as one of the four tracks of Olsen’s notable 2018 release ‘Dark Heart’ on Another Timbre label. Their collaborative relationship has been rapidly flourishing and deepened with intensity since then. Subsequently, Sansón and Olsen recorded four new collaboration pieces in 2017-2018: two variations of the interpretation of Olsen’s painting/graphic score Pra Mim (2016) by Sansón; and two variations of the interpretation of Sansón’s graphic score Meditations (2017) by Olsen. This double CD ‘Works on Paper’ (elsewhere 006-2) contains these four pieces on two discs in nonchronological order.

Sansón said, “At some level, I find no distinction between painting and sound making. The processes are similar in essence and they seem to come from the same place. In the case of Lance’s paintings, I find a great example of this. He is able to switch mediums and combine them as if there were no actual distinction. I believe the idea that you can make music that is both radically modern without sacrificing the idea of beauty, which to me remains essential and grounds me in the centuries-old tradition of Western classical music, so dear to me since I was a child.”

Their realizations are exquisitely layered collages of sparse sounds of musical instruments, objects, electronics, field recordings, voices, and fragments of their past compositions and early classical music as samples, creating an open, profound expansion of the horizon of the music. The intense, vibrant raw energy and graceful beauty immanent in both artists’ pieces are organically integrated into one whole album, forming an epic arch that connects the inner worlds of the two artists poignantly yet meditatively.