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RONE & GASPAR CLAUS
This live session, featuring cellist Gaspar Claus, took place on November 19th, 2009 at Café de la Danse, Paris.
I met Gaspar about two years ago. He was playing a wonderful music with his father, the famous flamenco guitarist, Pedro Soler. I was instantly captivated by the character, a kind of punk-dandy, brilliant and a little weird, traveling all over the world carrying his massive cello on his shoulders. I asked him to be my partner on a film soundtrack project, "La Femme à Cordes", directed by Vladimir Mavounia-Kouka, who is the creator of Spanish Breakfast music video.
A few month later, my label InFiné offered us the opportunity to unite our skills in order to support the band Aufgang as they were performing for the first time in Paris.
I remember the few days we had to prepare this concert. I already had selected a certain amount of beats and the virtual synths that seemed to be adequate to build a basis for our project. Then I presented my work to Gaspar, in order to know what he thought of these drafts. His response was instantaneous. He immediately took his bow and jammed on my music.
Suddenly my monologue became a dialogue.
I enjoyed this situation: the fact that a single thought can lead to a shape, built step by step by sharing and welcoming different suggestions.
We played, a long long time. We were seeking, experimenting, and sometimes something beautiful emerged, something evident that was beyond us, beyond everything. When it happened, we used to make a little break, sharing a glass of Suze, then we were back again, to our music, inventing our own language.
It is pleasant and always amazing to see how far a collective creation can lead. There is a balance to reach, to define each others parts, with an absolute freedom of expression from and for both of us. In a two-hands work, you always have to wonder what you can do for your partner, not what you cannot ask. It's a difficult work (as well as a game), but it remains terribly exciting.
This public recording is therefore a collective composition, captured in real time.
It is an act of creation, with its impulses of hopes and doubts, with its hitches, mistakes and randomnesses, that make it so lively and significant to me.
Text by Erwan Castex (Rone). Thanks to Karine Gence.
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