Daniel Kientzy - Contours (2020)

The collaboration between the Apulian label Dodicilune and Francesca Gemmo continues. The Venetian composer and pianist, after participating in the projects "Luc Ferrari Exercises IMProvisation" with Giancarlo Schiaffini, Walter Prati and Sergio Armaroli (2018) and "Syzygy" by the multi-instrumentalist, composer and American performer Elliott Sharp (2019), and l solo album "Ad libitum" (2019), returns with "Contours".

The new album, distributed on Wednesday 3 June in Italy and abroad by Ird and in the best online stores of Believe Digital, offers six original compositions of the musician - here on the pianet, an electromechanical piano - with the direction of the French musician and performer Daniel Kientzy playing sax and double bass.

Travel companions in this adventure Giuseppe Giuliano (mellotron), Cécile Marchand (clouet, flute), Luc Balestro (alto sax) and Wim Hoogewerf (guitar).

«You can breathe a rare serenity in the folds of Contours. Poetic, suggestions that refer to the minimalist visions of the 1950s that damaged the obsequious Viennese serialism in favor of a new libertarian musical journey, which sought colors, sounds and rhythms of life in other parts of the world, in Asia, in Africa », Paolo Carradori underlines in the cover notes. «But Contours also flutter sound mixtures which, involving, among others, two Pianets Honher and two Mellotron keyboards, evoke experimental pop / rock environments of the Sixties, dragging them into the contemporary world. On this original texture, never nostalgic, enlarged by flutes, violas, guitars and double bass, the saxophone (solo and the complete family) as the narrating voice acts as an introductory element to paintings that are repeated almost the same in their frame, even temporal, but at the inside which the reed interacts, declaims, crosses the other voices », continues the music critic and organizer. «A lyrical, dreamy, dancing, melodic sax that in a vital syncretism brushes a suspended, visionary, pastel-colored scenario, where everything is dragged into a destabilizing, alienating and endless vortex. The commission that in 2016 the saxophonist, French performer Daniel Kientzy offers Francesca Gemmo is a project that to define structured is an understatement. Everything is planned, the instrumental staff, the subdivision into six frames, the duration, the methods of accompaniment. Idea that does not include live performances, the result of a montage of the recordings of the individual instruments made in different sessions. Gemmo manages to extricate itself from this spider web by respecting Kientzy's design instructions, at the same time building an open work of great sound appeal, in a complex but light architecture that magically balances all the elements. Open work that in denying one of its live propositions offers the listener the responsibility of interpreting it in different ways, because to say it with Umberto Eco “every fruition is an interpretation and an execution, since in every fruition the work lives in a perspective original ... ". Contours is a work that sucks creative energy from the formal rigor of the score without ignoring the primacy of sound, gesture and silence. Fortunately an unclassifiable work that flows on a mobile background, made of fusions, contrasts, dialogues, landscapes and dreams. Repetitions, sound waves that ultimately remain in a circle in space, in the head ".