In advance of Blank Forms presentation of Inclinamen for Organ on May 2, 2017, Blank Forms' director Lawrence Kumpf sat down with Alexander Lau to play a selection of Jean-Luc Guionnet's recordings including tracks from his forthcoming release on Empty Editions

Jean-Luc Guionnet' practice is subdivided into as many parts as occasions arise for him to think and act in sound and image. A Parisian artist active in several fields (music, visual arts, cinema), he has worked mostly in electro-acoustics but also has a career in free improvisation and field recording, playing alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, church organ, and electricorgans. He studied musique concrète under Iannis Xenakis and tends to extract the tiniest details from sound, appreciating slowness and the obsessive exploration of simple processes. 

Music, for him, is a way to test reality. His organ performances are about encountering the machine, the mechanism of the organ. Imagining the organ halfway between a vehicle and artificial intelligence, he thinks of it as an organic device, every element of which can be made useful: it is at once a piano, a synthesizer, a drum, a mixing board, and a primitive computer with which he can drive, navigate, compute, conduct, mix, and auscultate. He seeks to incorporate the faults of any particular organ into his work, bringing them to resound with organic affect while keeping their raw qualities. Each organ is unique. For Guionnet, the project is to find out what makes it unique.

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Blank Forms #13: Jean-Luc Guionnet

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