Impermanence
Violeta García; Émilie Girard-Charest
Tour de Bras (tourdebras.bandcamp.com)
Impermanence is a recording of duo improvisations by two cellists, the Brazilian Violeta García, primarily active in improvised music, and Quebecoise Émilie Girard-Charest, who has been primarily active in contemporary composed music, but whose adeptness as an improviser has been abundantly clear in recent duet performances with saxophonist Yves Charuest.
The five improvisations are titled merely I to V, with no effort made to add a programmatic dimension through verbal association. Similarly, there’s no detailed account of secondary materials, no hints whether the final track is created by amplified cellos played with bows covered with iron filings in an echo chamber shared with turbines. Perhaps it’s just a miracle of technique, possibly aided by close recording. The music is, in short, astonishing, whether it’s a dance of skittering harmonics, a ping-pong match of guttural, low register glissandi, soaring anarchic runs, microsecond timbral shifts, wondrous rhythmic counterpoint, bow scrapings or sustained microtonal cries.
What is most beautiful about this recording may be the resonance of and its fidelity to, that title: Impermanence. The music is an insistent present, a presence, a mercurial shared consciousness. It lives in the instant of cognition, insisting on the listener’s attentiveness to that instant, rather than dragging along the past as part of an ongoing, imagined formal construct. A sudden burst of Messiaen-ic birds in the midst of III is just that, something for which to be grateful as one moves on.
