User:Ascendantair/sandbox

The Guitares Dérive duo was formed in Paris in 1974 by Vincent Le Masne and Bertrand Porquet co-composers and interpreters of their own original music on two classical guitars. Rapidly classified into the American "repetitive" category of that same period, their music nonetheless stands out by virtue of its writing, which avoids all systematisation in the repetition of musical phrases, but on the contrary constantly unfolds in the form of works entirely written, and of quite long duration. In the newspaper le Monde, Jacques Lonchampt spoke of the "exhilarating character of this music, in which two expressions, the one rhythmical and obsessive, the other melodic and symbolic, merge and drift according to a principle of infinitesimal variations, to take us, eventually, quite far from where we started out. These variations testify to great rigour, yet also to a keen sense of harmonic sequence, that is both highly daring and acoustically dynamic." Discovered by Daniel Caux, journalist and radio presenter, specializing in this kind of music, they performed numerous concerts, before recording the 1976 album Guitares Dérive for Shandar, a cult label par excellence set up in 1971 by gallery owner Chantal Darcy in collaboration with Daniel Caux as artistic director, whose catalogue includes, amongst others, albums by American minimalists like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Phil Glass... as well as jazz musicians Albert Ayler, Sun Ra ou Cecil Taylor. The album Guitares Dérive is a studio album recorded live in 1976 for the Shandar label (and reissued by Fractal Records in may 2010). "The acoustic instrument at its purest, yet imbued with great modernity. A pointillist music made up of a surge of interwoven notes which seem to multiply, although no re-recording was used" in the words of Jean-Marc Bailleux of Rock & Folk magazine. "Vincent Le Masne et Bertrand Porquet do not, as some tend to do, place complexity in the foreground in the guise of quality, as an alibi, as a mere cover for vacuity. Their approach is the very opposite: to present us with simplicity in which complexity lies hidden." Daniel Caux