The Possibility of a New Work for Aquaserge

Always ready to expand their scope and blur the genre borders, Aquaserge, the inventive, revered French avant-rock band have decided to tackle the field of contemporary classical music from the mid-20th century, in a special project which pays tribute to four major atypical figures: Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988), György Ligeti (1923-2006), Edgard Varèse (1883-1965) and Morton Feldman (1926-1987).

Drawing inspiration from these composers’ respective approaches in terms of dynamics, sonic textures and duration, more specifically from Scelsi’s exploration of timbres and oscillations, Ligeti’s moving clusters, Varèse’s melodic cubism and Feldman-type graphic scores, Aquaserge have approached this album with a mixture of raw intuition and strict method, and have created pieces for a hybrid, semi-classical and semi-rock expanded 9-piece line-up.

The album revolves around three slow, extended, spacious pieces, in which the instruments’ timbres are merging into one another to create a fascinating sonic matter, both immobile and moving, like in certain works by Ligeti and Scelsi. By contrast, Aquaserge’s tributes to Varèse and Feldman include explosive moments, as well as segments of wild improv. These original Aquaserge compositions are completed by interpretations of three rare songs written by Edgard Varèse (on a poem by Verlaine) and Morton Feldman (on a Rilke text), which remind us of Aquaserge’s taste for melodies.