Improvised music has many faces. Quentin Rollet and Jérôme Lorichon together are an exciting mystery. In turn blowing their saxophones or trumpets and tinkering with frequencies on their effects and synthesizers, they assemble percussive sounds, feedback and breaths, inventing a material that is both loose and coherent where each element of one dialogues with the elements of the other. Both have experience with multiple groups and projects. Jérôme Lorichon played in Purr, The Berg Sans Nipple and is now part of Zombie Zombie and Quentin Rollet played in Prohibition, Red Krayola, Nurse With Wound and many others; while leading the adventure of his new label Bisou after having led the one of Rectangle for several years. The very first album from the duo will be released to mark the label’s 30th anniversary ! Quite an event !
Biography by Julien Bécourt for the Planisphère album release
Quentin Rollet and Jérôme Lorichon have worked together on a number of projects (including live soundtracks and a recent tour in China with avant-folk icon Emmanuelle Parrenin), and are back at it again following the release of their single Eléphantasme on Fabrice Laureau’s ‘handmade’ label Ouvré. Faithful to the malleable parameters of improvisation, Lorichon here abandons the drums to weave an electronic web, as rough as it is subtle, around Rollet’s improvised spurts on alto saxophone and sopranino. The abstract oscillations pulsating through the Buchla miraculously highlight Rollet’s zig-zagging melodies. Dislocated rhythms, sinusoidal welts and throbbing pulses cover the brassy roundness of the wind instrument, in a constant alternation between atonal minimalism and Dionysian frenzy. A deluge of analogue hailstones is followed by rustles, metallic resonances, rattling reeds and sighs expelled from the lungs. Somewhere between free jazz and post-industrial music, this album – recorded in one go and without overdubs – recalls at times the legendary collaboration between Wolf Eyes and Anthony Braxton. But you could just as easily imagine a jam session between Joe McPhee and Morton Subotnick in the Red Room of Twin Peaks. It’s thrilling, vibrant music, with occasional hints of anxiety, and each sound – like each interval of silence – materializes a universe of its own.
While its amplitude touches on the cosmic, it nevertheless remains anchored in the very materiality of the sound gesture and engraved in the eternal recommencement of the here and now. The two musicians, eager to experiment in all directions, turn conventions upside down to offer a musical journey whose itinerary is never mapped out in advance and whose destination remains known only to them. For this music, unique in its (non-)genre, is above all an offering to time and space, a condensation of two lives that become one through sound.
As soon as saxophonist Quentin Rollet, ambassador of free and adventurous music, starts improvising with Jérôme Lorichon, multi-instrumentalist and tamer of modular synthesizers, you won’t know what hit you! A long and solid friendship has been forged between the two musicians, who are no strangers to improvisation and have never seemed so complementary as in this instrumental battle.
Jérôme Lorichon – aka Lori Sean Berg, Dr Schönberg or Cheucheu – has been active on the indie circuit for nearly thirty years. Drummer with Purr, Berg Sans Nipple, Antilles, Capricorne Band, and percussionist with Zombie Zombie, Lorichon is a jack-of-all-trades who knows no blinkers. His live set-up includes electronic gear that he manipulates in real time, in addition to percussion and trumpet. He has toured with Jason Glasser, Emmanuelle Parrenin, Don Nino & Françoiz Breut and produced soundtracks for fashion, the visual arts, the circus and film.
Pillar of the Prohibited label, his adoptive family since he met the Laureau brothers in the early 1990s, Quentin Rollet is a key figure in French avant-rock. After starting out in the post-hardcore band Prohibition, he set up the Rectangle label in 1995 with improvised music guitarist Noël Akchoté. Some fifty titles were released on vinyl, featuring the cream of free jazz, electro-acoustic and eccentric chanson, from Fred Frith to Philippe Katerine, Derek Bailey, Costes and Joëlle Léandre. His instantly recognisable free jazz has been heard with Nurse With Wound, Red Krayola, Zombie Zombie, Pointe du Lac and countless other artists. It’s a music of the moment, perpetually suspended above the abyss, whose agility and power can be felt live on stage. Over the last few years, he has ‘miniaturised’ his electronic equipment (phone apps, mini-Korg, etc.) to coordinate with his body movements. He punctuates his melodic phrases with more noisy or drone-like flights, using the continuous breath technique. In 2017, spurred on by violinist Isabelle Magnon, he set up the Bisou Records label, dedicated to free and post-industrial arabesques. A bon vivant through and through, Quentin Rollet is also a lover of natural wine, and has been working at the famous Baron Rouge bar in Paris for the last ten years.
LIVE ! 19 March 2025 at La Marbrerie, Montreuil, NLF3 and R/A/D for the 30 Years of PROHIBITED RECORDS celebration. Informations & tickets
Credits :
Quentin Rollet :
Alto & Sopranino saxophones, Korg Monotron Delay
Jérôme Lorichon :
Buchla 208, Percussion synthesizer, Pocket Trumpet , effects
Recorded, mixed and mastered_by Fabrice Laureau in Paris, France.
Drawings by José Maria Gonzalez
Extracts from notebooks 2022-2023,_Untitled, 27x36cm, Acrylic on paper
Live picts © Laurent Orseau
