BLACK MUSEUM Bruno Letort

• 1THE WINSHIELD08:29
• 2BLACK NIGHT05:23
• 3BLACK MUSEUM10:14
• 4ECSTATIC GREY LIMIT03:43
• 5BLACK MAGIC06:00
• 6NEWSPAPER03:48
• 7STUPID CLOCK09:27
• 8BLACK OSCILLATIONS04:21
• Total Runtime51:25

Info for BLACK MUSEUM

With a cover by François Schuiten, musicians as prestigious as they are varied, including David Krakauer, Evan Ziporyn, David Torn, David Linx, Mike Ladd, Thomas Bloch and Christian Zanési, lyrics by Laurie Anderson, and all under the supervision of composer Bruno Letort, whom I obviously knew as a radio man, having played several times on his Tapage nocturne programme during the twenty years he worked for France Musique, the Black Museum album was enough to make me sit up and take notice. In 1998 I contributed to his book Musiques plurielles, but what I remember most is Bruno Letort's professionalism when it came to presenting the work of one of his colleagues or interviewing them on air (see some of my contributions in indexes 4, 6, 16, 24 and 27). Yet he has never stopped composing since his first albums in the early 80s, nor collaborating with Schuiten and Peeters, Richard Galliano or Wally Badarou, Jean-Claude Petit or Bruno Coulais, Ghédalia Tazartès or Henry Selick, and so many others like Stromae, for whom he arranged six songs on his album Multitude. So why did I immediately think of Hector Zazou? Perhaps because of his ability to take people with him on his adventures, resulting in a kind of new baroque...

A dramatic universe, generously heavy rhythms, saturated guitars soaring into the hangers, clarinets, horn and bassoon, string quartets and reinforcement by the strings in general, the music of Black Museum is both charged and driving, as if feedback served as an Ariadne's thread. The improvisations generate the written word, and this practice encourages piling on. Electronic sounds are given a great deal of freedom, mingling with obstinato bows. Letort plays keyboards, electronic sounds and percussion. And the voices comment here and there on this comic strip without images.

Bruno Letort

Bruno Letort
A guitarist and composer, Bruno Letort published, in the early 1980s, a series of albums on the fringes of jazz and rock while collaborating with very many musicians from the jazz and improvised music scenes. He created his own label, Cube Music, then founded the label Signature for Radio France. A producer for France Musique, he created Tapage nocturne, a broadcast devoted to inventive forms of music.

Attracted by pluridisciplinarity, Letort has composed for the theatre, cinema, dance, video and scenography. He uses the stylistic techniques developed by the minimalists, whose relationship to pulsation fascinates him, and incorporates into it some personal elements. While he particularly appreciates writing for string quartet, he composes for all formations: Continent Obscur for orchestra, commissioned by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France (1999); Poussière de voyages for piano and cello, first performed by the duet Arnaud Thorette and Johan Farjot (2006); Requiem for Tchernobyl, commissioned by the French State and premiered at Minsk by the Chorus and National Orchestra of Belarus conducted by Andrei Galanov (2006); Lignes for ensemble, first performed by the ensemble Musiques Nouvelles conducted by Jean-Paul Dessy with the collaboration of the illustrator Denis Deprez and the video director Yuki Kawamura (2007).

He has collaborated closely with the illustrator and scenographer François Schuiten and the writer Benoit Peeters on many projects, including L’affaire Desombres, a show premiered in Grenoble at the 38e Rugissants (2001); the scenic version of Souvenirs de l’éternel présent (2009); La frontière invisible, musical fiction first performed at the Bouffes du Nord (2014); the music for the exhibition Revoir Paris at the Cité de l’Architecture (2014); and the music of La Tour, a concert-fiction on France Culture first performed by the Orchestre National de France conducted by Jesko Sirvend with the ondes Martenot player Nadia Ratsimandresy (2017).

This album contains no booklet.