VA - The Mayfield (2024)

The instrumentalists of The Mayfield have together created the music to the large scale performance Everything that happened and would happen by Heiner Goebbels – a music theatre piece on Europe as a historical and contemporary ‘construction site’. The band is named after the Mayfield Depot, a vast disused railway station in Manchester, in which they rehearsed and created the work. It inspired the aesthetics of the music. The instrumentation is dedicated to a coexistence of acoustic and electronic sources, ranging from percussion, as the earliest and universal source of musical expression, to birdcalls, saxophones and prepared grand piano and to Ondes Martenot, one of the first electronic instruments. An invented electric guitar added with digital sensors bridges the gap between these different sonic universes. The Mayfield music results in soundscapes between controlled noise and ‘musique concrête instrumentale’. At La Muse en Circuit – the Parisian recording studio designed specifically for electro-acoustic music that Luc Ferrari established in 1982 – the musicians recorded 95 improvised pieces. Willi Bopp, who has worked closely with Goebbels for 35 years, subsequently created a collage of those selections, which were further winnowed and sequenced into the seamless 16-track selection featured on this remarkable album. „The collective’s brand of free improvisation is stunning, a liquid form of electro-acoustic music of uncommon physicality, depth, and dynamics that sounds like little else in the realm of contemporary experimental music“, writes Peter Margasak in the liner notes.

Willi Bopp: Sound Design
Camille Émaille: Percussion
Gianni Gebbia: Saxophones
Heiner Goebbels: Prepared Grand Piano
Cécile Lartigau: Ondes Martenot
Nicolas Perrin: Guitar, Electronics