Two events marked the third part of the PSWAR new project Beauty Unrealized in which the sound became a main focus:

Benoit Goupy: Le Source

In his new work, Benoit Goupy went back to the source and essence of his artistic practice. Goupy’s works manifest themselves usually as subtle interventions in the space that he sees as live organisms; they always appear “here and there but not anywhere on the surface of the space, as arteries under the skin.” Following the architecture of the space, Goupy’s marks inside a space are a product of the traces that the outside reality leaves on his own perception. In the space of the PSWAR library, Goupy allowed a new element to step into his work: a sound performance that connects together his intimate story and the story of the space.

The duo Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M with Axel Doerner and Martin Brandlmayr (concert)

Otomo Yoshihide is one of the most creative sound artists nowadays, experimenting with both medium and form. For much of the 1990s his main project was Ground Zero, a large group founded with an everchanging lineup. Towards the end of that group’s life, Otomo formed two electronic free improvisation groups: Filament with Sachiko M, and I. S. O., with Sachiko M and Yoshimitsu Ichiraku. These groups abandoned the frenetic postmodern pastiche of Ground Zero, and emphasized small gestures and low volume. The music contained no samples, being made of sine waves and electronic clicks and hums. Yoshihide largely stopped using records as a sound source, instead manipulating the turntable itself with a wide variety of objects and contact microphones. At the end of the 1990s he founded Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Ensemble. Besides her work with Yoshihide, Sachiko M is also one half of the blisteringly silent and beautiful duo Cosmos with Ami Yoshide. Her earlier work with samplers led to her current methods of using samplers to produce sine tones which she very subtly manipulates. Axel Dörner is a trumpet player who along with musicians like Robin Hayward was involved in the musical current of extended techniques which came to be known as Berlin Reductionism, and can also be heard on two recent releases of Yoshihide’s New Jazz Orchestra. The fourth member is the drummer/percussionist Martin Brandlmayr, a member of two extraordinary bands to come out of Austria in the last few years, Trapist and Radian, both of which effortlessly break the boundaries between avant-garde, electronica, rock and jazz. January 2007 marked a first European tour of this quartet.