Penultimate Press & Cuspeditions present… The Pancrace Project
Music for pipe organ Stiehr-Mockers 1848, bird whistles, Baroque Violin, Irish Flutes, Boîtes à Bourdons, Landscape Piano, Motorised Bows, Standuino Pi Synth, Microphones, Hurgy Toys, AM radio, Church Bells, Uillean Pipes and Hulusi Flutes.
Pancrace is a unique improvising quintet comprising French, British and Austrian performers. The members include Prune Bécheau, Arden Day, Julien Desailly, Léo Maurel and Jan Vysocky. Pancrace is also the name of the church in Dangolsheim Alsace and is next to where the instrument inventor Léo Maurel, known for his ingeniously designed instruments inspired by the hurdy gurdy, lives.
In Pancrace one can hear a radical new music comprised of many of Léo’s shape-shifting instruments and devices being utilised without knowing which are bowed, plucked, hammered or rubbed. The results are a maelstrom of sound and song which see-saw between the harrowing and the sublime with incredible detail to sonic content.
One of the most exciting debut’s to arrive in recent times the material recorded at Saint-Pancrace/Dangolsheim in April 2015 will be Published on double vinyl by Penultimate Press
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Pancrace is a unique improvising quintet comprising French, British and Austrian performers. The members include Prune Bécheau, Arden Day, Julien Desailly, Léo Maurel and Jan Vysocky: a combination of unorthodox sound sources has led them to free playing and group composing.
Based in Dangolsheim since 2010, I design and manufacture in my workshop unusual instruments for people curious about new interfaces and sound experiences, whether in experimental or contemporary music, for theater, artistic installations, or pedagogy. My research focuses mainly on "acoustic" instruments, which inherit the ways of thinking and playing of electronic instruments born in the 20th century. I have thus developed several models of motorized hurdy-gurdies, as well as computer-controlled, spatialized and transportable organs. I also have a certain attraction to the playful character and collective play; certain projects such as Veines de Vent, l'Orgue Sourd, l'Organous, or le Télécatida testify to this.
I had the opportunity to work for Yann Gourdon, Super Parquet, Oiseau Tempete, Stephen O'Malley, Kali Malone, Golem Mécanique, Alexis Degrenier, Heiner Goebbels, Cie Bas les Pat'hibulaires, Tarek Atoui, Ensemble Batida, Ensemble HanatsuMiroir, Ensemble Recherche, Clément Vercelleto, Ernest Bergez, Julien Chamla, the CFMI of Sélestat and Lille, among others.
Jan Vysocky is a composer and sound designer of Austrian/Czech origin.
Trained at the Electroacoustic Institute as well as at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, he began collaborating with young French directors in the early 2000s, thanks to encounters made during a series of concerts of electroacoustic music.
Particularly interested in the relationship between sound creation, image and dramaturgy, he composes music and sound creation for various short and feature-length fiction and documentary films, plays and dance.
Living in Paris since 2010, he created the Studio Cairos and the association Cairos Edition for music and sound creation.
Arden Day (UK/France) is a pianist, hurgytronist and improviser currently living in Paris and involved in cross-disciplinary projects. He focuses mainly on extended piano techniques with a micro symphonic approach using all kinds of motorised bows deranging the acoustic limits of the instrument.
Psykick Dancehall is a collaboration between Hannah Ellul and Ben Knight that emerged from an involvement in underground experimental music in the UK. Initially based around a label and events, it has subsequently expanded to incorporate other activities, often in collaboration with different artists along the way.
DANCEHALL was a DIY journal of exploratory sound & music produced between 2010 and 2017.
It was established to explore how we frame, discuss and come to understand our experiences of sound. We are interested in opening up that discussion, thinking about our encounters with music in relation to our everyday sonic lives - how it arises from that experience, responds to it and intersects with it - in different contexts.