The French composer and guitarist Julien Desprez stars this Thursday at CentroCentro in a new instalment of the Vang cycle.
The French guitarist and composer Julien Desprez (Paris, 1984) is the protagonist of the new concert that will take place this Thursday in Madrid, at 19:30, in the auditorium of CentroCentro, as part of the programme of the sixth edition of the cycle VANG. Músicas en vanguardia, curated by Sergio Luque and Victor Barceló.
The concert, entitled Agora, alludes to the 21-minute piece of the same title, composed in 2020, in Paris, during the periods of worldwide house arrest to which we were subjected due to the covid-19 pandemic. The musician, one of the leading exponents of free and experimental improvisation on the guitar on the European music scene, devoted part of the confinement to researching sound creation techniques. At Agora, the research focused on impedance (basically, how to manage the electrical voltage of a sound device such as the electric guitar) and podorythmie (a traditional French-Canadian percussion technique that consists of tapping with the feet during musical performances in which, to produce a sound that is loud enough to be heard above the music, the performer uses special surfaces and shoes, or even, in professional stage productions, contact microphones or amplified boards to increase the volume of the percussion with the feet), generating rhythms while stepping on effect pedals.
Desprez worked for this piece using guitar and effects pedals as the only instrument, and worked on generating strong differences in dynamics. For its title he drew on two different meanings of “agora”. On the one hand, the space in the city-states of the ancient Greeks where citizens used to congregate, while on the other hand, “agora” means “now” in Portuguese, a double meaning that Desprez likes very much, as he said in interviews for the Cataclisma Improvisation Festival in the Italian city of Rovigo, which in 2020 was held exclusively digitally on 20 November.
The piece he prepared for Cataclisma 2020, and released by Coax Records, has been defined as “an earthquake of square and sawtooth sound waves, clippings and pulsations in an ocean of layers of white noise”. In a conversation on Instagram, Desprez says that Agora is “a piece with a very precise form and skeleton but that I make it evolve with each concert: we will find the same narrative and the same dynamics but in a different way each time”. It is “an evolving work” that “will of course be longer” than the original twenty-one minutes and will have “new parts”.