AUM Grand Ensemble

The A is yellow, as we say
It is Energy spreading itself ;
The U is white,
It is Light ;
The M is black,
It is Darkness.

AUM is the sacred syllable of the Hindu religion. It would mean something like ‘I currys’, and would represent all at once – the divine verb in an audible form, the Fire of the Sun ; Unity, Cosmos, the vastness of the Universe ; the past, the present, the future ; the whole of Knowledge. It would also contain the very essence of all the sounds that have been, are, or will be uttered.

Since 2010, AUM Grand Ensemble, hybrid band between a chamber orchestra, a big band and an ultra-modern gamelan – in the sense of set of resonant instruments that Olivier Messiaen defined – reflects upon a kind of common source of different music traditions – from Renaissance’s musics to the musics of Morton Feldman, Ligeti, Grisey or LaMonte Young, and those, ancestral and innumerable, from Asia. The source of a certain physical, organic sensibility to the sound matter. A music in which composition and improvisation are constantly serving each other, guided by the search of  a living, shifting sound – a music about masses, timbre melting, textures, about processes more than events, reflecting upon the role of the voice, evolution of continuous matters, long forms, non-temperated tunes, the acoustic phenomenon of beats, resonant, silence… 

In ‘You’ve never listened to the wind’, beats, resonances or tuning are approached through a totally original point of view by the use of keyboards from an Indonesian gamelan mixed with the instrumentarium of the ensemble.

The music is built around some fragments of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry coming from The Keeper of Sheep, poems that Pessoa wrote, as he liked to relate, during only few hours, a day of march 1914, almost in a trance, filled by his heteronymous Alberto Caïro, who was, according to him, a marginal, at once heir to Lao-Tseu, Milarepa and Socrates. Each of those poems are like a koan, a statement of unlearning, implied by the need to reconnect with the fullness of sensations …

LINE-UP
Ellen Giacone : voice
Julien Pontvianne  : clarinet, saxophone
Antonin-Tri Hoang  : clarinet, saxophone
Jean-Brice Godet : clarinets, tapes
Amélie Grould : vibraphone
Stéphane Garin : percussions
Julien Loutelier : percussions
Jozef Dumoulin : piano
Tony Paeleman : fender rhodes
Alexandre Herer : electronics
Richard Comte : guitar
Youen Cadiou : bass
Simon Tailleu : bass
Léo Margue : conductor
Pierre Favrez : sound engineer