All sorts of jazz, free jazz and improv. Never for money, always for love.
« neigen », from the German verb: to tend towards.
Improvisers aspire to the unpredictable, in a relationship of mutual trust. Each one, braced in the moment, is inhabited by the memory of countless music played, heard, dreamed of. Determined by instrumental practice, acquired experience, and by instinct and thought of one’s own.
They strive for those suspended moments where they surrender to this magic that runs through them, of which they become receivers, conducting bodies. They cultivate an appetite for these intense plateaus where one experiences, sometimes fleetingly, an intuitive connection between musicians linked by a telepathic thread.
Sylvaine Hélary’s new quartet explores a more electric branch of her work as a composer, creating here heady melodies, romantic sizzles, amplified rhythmic hordes and waves of misty ritornelles. Each piece thus collected, like timeless portraits of imaginary characters and situations, leaves in its wake the traces of a captivating soundtrack. The legacy of ancient legends (Henry Cow, Robert Wyatt, Arto Lindsay, Stereolab) rubs shoulders with the emergence of a world of astonishing dimensions, where the outlines of a singular soundscape are drawn, reflecting various and complementary expressions of the four musical personalities involved who express themselves with joyful freedom. Acting as a bridge between the very English "Canterbury" scene, contemporary jazz and experimental pop, this group produces the sound of a life in scintillating and phosphorescent colors, a refreshing and bewitching "Glowing Life" promising bright futures.
« The ritualistic form… creates fear, for example, by creating an imaginative, often mythological experience which, by containing its own logic within itself, has no reference to any specific time or place, and is forever valid for all time and place…
Above all, the ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source of the dramatic action, but as a somewhat depersonalized element in a dramatic whole. »
Maya Deren (in An anagram of ideas on art, form and film, 1946)
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Founded in 2000 in Sweden by Jan Ström and Åke Bjurhamn, Ayler Records has gained recognition among free jazz fans over the years by releasing both archive and contemporary recordings from artists as diverse as Jimmy Lyons, Noah Howard, Peter Brötzmann, William Parker or Charles Gayle, as well as documenting the Scandinavian free jazz scene.
In 2009, Ayler Records moved to France where it is now operated by Stéphane Berland who had joined the label in 2005, bringing with him the will to open the catalogue to forms of improvised music in less direct relationship with the free jazz history, while remaining faithful to the original spirit.