Pang ! [TB#2.5] | June & July 2021, France

Sophie Agnel, Ben Lamar Gay, Pascal Niggenkemper and Sam Pluta are multiple, they are known for that, for being a bit of demiurges on the edges, creators and abusers of worlds. That is to say that they do not stop things in their tracks, and they do not classify anything. At the sources of sound and in its depths, there are always other sounds, twists and contortions, a shadow behind a light behind a shadow: a trade of transparencies and opacities, the office of the cards. One could imagine a golem, which this time would not be made of clay but of copper, ropes and cables, relaying all information, all sources, all sounds. Revealing that all sources are resources, no more and no less, whether they are acoustic, electric or electronic. And it will be often to be mistaken: the cornucopia-cornet passes in the key-ring-laptop, which passes in the double bass-earth, which passes in the piano-master key: all is a matter of grafts and griffins. The instruments are played, prepared, tampered with, amplified, filtered, taken and taken again, like fry in the river, like pebbles in the river. The music is the river.

June 26, The Bridge 2.5 launches itself, never in a vacuum, at the Confort Moderne. Bruisme Festival, organized by Jazz à Poitiers: everything is about tiny revelations, crumpling and crumpling, under the surface of sounds. Schools of sounds and fish.

June 27, Ben Lamar Gay and Pascal Niggenkemper are getting ready to open all the doors and windows of the Vélo Théâtre in Apt. With Sophie Agnel (who took the photo, but also prepares her piano, her harmonica, her bells) and Sam Pluta (he is the electronic mason), they give a chimerical answer, the only answer that is worthwhile, to the name of this festival: The Sound of the Peoples.

June 28, it is midnight in Luzillé, in the Cappozzone. It is the hour and the gold of a Trumpet Summit between Jean-Luc Cappozzo and Ben Lamar Gay. Compound names, improvised names, secret languages.

June 30, Guipavas, with the Reception and Accommodation Program for Asylum Seekers, in the parking lot of a former Formula 1 hotel. But we are never with a program, we are with Afghans or Guineans. With human beings on Earth. In the human warmth.

June 30, Brest. The Bridge 2.5 is diving at Vauban, near the Plages Magnétiques. We saw mermaids. We heard their singing. From afar, a golden listener compared them to Don Cherry featuring Fennesz. You could say that. You could say anything. We’re allowed. Heading to Dijon now.

July 1st, Dijon. It’s summer but we’re at the Singe en Hiver, thanks to Zutique’s allies. Sam Pluta is waiting for the start of the trio concert this time with Ben Lamar Gay and Pascal Niggenkemper, in the attic of the galaxy barn. Where in a moment they will brew all that it is possible to brew, in terms of sounds, in the live of this raw material.

July 2, Montpellier. At the back of La Baignoire, Ben Lamar Gay met up with Denis Fournier, the drummer, percussionist and puma of Escape Lane (The Bridge #6), for a duet of caresses and scratches sometimes haloed by legends and tales, of good adventures.

July 3, Rodez. In the dark, the very luminous darkness of the Soulages Museum, Ben Lamar Gay and Pascal Niggenkemper have ritualized as one vaporizes, as one powders. To make appear the hidden forms, the always first forms of life. The nebulae.

July 5, Lille. At La Malterie, with the buccaneers of Muzzix, Peter Orins started with a solo of windings and unwindings, a real genesis with percussions, before The Bridge 2.5 in its entirety again (here Sophie Agnel, sharing her time and arms between keyboard and soundboard) reopened the lines of communication and transmutation.

July 6, Pantin. There are underwater waves – we sometimes say internal tides – that lift depths into depths, that superimpose depths and listen to them crack under their insensible weight. There are geysers. Like at La Dynamo in Pantin that evening.

July 7, Lyon. The Bridge 2.5 is in Lyon, at the Périscope, for Radio Béguin, for Radio Terrasse, after Nuits, the quartet. It was sometimes a bank of fog, it is now also the pack of wolves that splits it. Sophie Agnel, Ben Lamar Gay, Pascal Niggenkemper and Sam Pluta went in search of new imbalances.

July 8, Pont de Cirou, at the gates of the Aveyron. The AJAL association has also opened the doors of another world in another village, where the sense of hospitality between the inhabitants and the inhabited is like the sense of hospitality in music. Music open to its turn, music offered between heaven and earth.

July 10, Luz-Saint-Sauveur in the Pyrenees. The Jazz à Luz Festival, in its mountain circus, is a convention of mutants, it is the court of the Brotherhood of Pirates that frees everyone, and it is there that the quartet ends between dog and wolf and dragon, and evaporates, soulful, and promises to return.

And they have a name now: Pang! And there are still stories to tell, old and future legends…