Jean-Luc Guionnet

The work of Jean-Luc Guionnet deals at times with organs, church organs, pipe organs. Only one piece here with organ sounds. All three are granted a text to explain what they are about, but they aren't too easy to understand. Likewise I don't know what Guionnet does to his organ sounds. Are they played in real time? Are they layered? Are they processed? I simply don't know. In 'Espace Bas' it seems this is not the case, and its played 'as is', with lots of air sounding through occasionally played tones and small clusters of tones. The shortest piece, the title piece, which doesn't seem to have organ sounds, but what it is that is played here I don't know, but this seems to be a much more electronic sound of a hardly identifiable nature. Feedback? Electronics? Enhanced room acoustics? Quite a heavy piece of music here, almost noise based, which seems unlike Guionnet. 'Estuaire' is the longest piece on this double set, which is also very unclear what the sound event is, but its a much more 'mellow' piece than previous piece (which are on the same disc). Slow humming - a motor, an engine, perhaps - with very minimal changes throughout. This is a beautiful piece, the best out of three. Its a piece of ambient music built from all sorts of frequencies that just by themselves wouldn't qualify as relaxing ambient music, but in the drone like capacities work absolutely nice. Very refined this one, whereas the other two are good, and the title piece is the least convincing one.