Two Recent albums from French pianist Frédéric Blondy

By Eyal Hareuveni

French experimental pianist Frédéric Blondy studied mathematics and physics before dedicating himself full-time to music, He has worked with Paul Lovens, Joëlle Léandre, Urs Leimgruber,Daunik Lazro, John Tilbury, Otomo Yoshihide, Mats Gustafsson, and has refined refining a body-based approach to the piano.

ONCEIM - Laminaire (Relative Pitch, 2024) 

ONCEIM (Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicales) is a French new music ensemble, established in 2011 by Blondy, and comprising over 30 European improvisers and members of prominent jazz, free jazz, free improv, experimental music and contemporary classical ensembles, among them clarinetist Xavier Charles, double bass players Sébastien Beliah and Benjamin Duboc, drummer Antonin Gerbal, Swiss sax player Bertrand Denzler and Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger. ONCEIM focuses on exploring contemporary research of sound creation, including a self-invented 'plastique du sonore' (plastic sound) approach, and collective and innovative practices of free improvisation. Each musician has a major creative role within the ensemble, built on his singular virtuosity and original musical vocabulary, as if each musician were one tool within a toolbox, and all at the service of the project being undertaken. ONCEIM operates without necessarily knowing where its musicians go, meet each other, overlap, manufacture, shape, listen, listen to each other and create, together.

ONCEIM has performed several pieces written by Stephen O'Malley, Eliane Radigue, Jérôme Noetinger. Christian Marclay and Kim O’Rourke, as well as pieces of its own electronics player Arnaud Rivière and double bass player Beliah. Laminaire is the sixth album of this ensemble and features three improvised pieces recorded between 2018 and 2020, each of these pieces searches for unchartered and challenging sonic territory. The first piece, the 49-minute “Gorges Gard”, was recorded at Eglise Saint-Merry in Paris, in October 2020 and suggested reductionist and sparse dynamics and only occasionally and briefly gravitate towards sonic storms that use the whole ensemble's sonic palette. This piece tends to blur the sense of time and reflect the ensemble’s ever-present potential for serendipity and the discovered benefits from such an approach.

The second, short piece “A la Muse” was recorded at La Muse en Circuit in Alfortville in January 2020, and it introduces a mysterious tension to the minimalist, austere aesthetics of ONCEIM, ornamented by sudden, industrial-like percussive sounds. The last, title piece is part of a cycle of pieces by this name and was recorded live at all Eglise Saint-Merry in Paris in April 2018. It refers to a laminar flow, which in physical terms concerns the process whereby layers of fluid slide on top of each other. This drone piece begins to exhaust the orchestral potential of ONCEIM and enriches its layered sounds and sensory palette.

Hubbub - abb abb abb (Relative Pitch, 2024) 

The French quintet features pianist Blondy, tenor sax player Denzler and electric guitarist Jean-Sébastien Mariage from ONCEIM plus two more idiosyncratic improvisers - alto sax player Jean-Luc Guionnet (who also did the cover artwork) and percussionist Edward Perraud (aho did the back cover artwork), and has been working for 25 years now. abb abb abb is the sixth album of the quintet (it has released three albums on Eddie Prévost's Matchless label) and it was recorded at Eglise Saint-Merry in Paris in August 2019.

Hubbub defines its work as focused on “the sound matter to create a moving electro-acoustic space inhabited by layers, distensions, imbrications, pulsations, dots and lines. Between acoustic and electric, at the crossroads of several worlds, the group consists of five musicians whose activities trace multiple ramifications”. The album offers two masterful and enigmatic, collective improvisations - the 39-minute “abb abb” and the 19-minute “abb” - that suggests the minimalist and quiet yet intense and highly detailed sonic universe Hubbub has established. The music flows organically, following its mysterious singular logic and offers kaleidoscopic textures that enjoy the deep listening and trust the five musicians share. Hubbub creates orchestral, epic drone-like pieces, larger than the sum of Hubbub’s parts, as it often becomes one, dense but almost ethereal and weightless sonic entity, beautifully triggering the mind and the soul.