ÁLEX REVIRIEGO / TOM CHANT - du mamelon
Je n’aurai jamais ma main. Après, la domesticit mêne trop loin.
I’ve been obsessed with this particular quote since my first encounter with Une saison en enfer. The little black bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s works, together with McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, were two books that have accompanied me regularly on tours and travels, their wild and unhinged imagination has somehow become ingrained in my psyche. At some point it almost became a dangerous obsession. There is a Rimbaud quote for every single situation and person. This one always made me think of Tom Chant.
I played for the first time with Tom more than a decade ago and we've worked together in different contexts ever since. As a young musician trying to figure out “what to do” (I’m not talking just “improvisation”, or even “music”, I mean something broader), the nights spent drinking with Tom and the innumerable conversations about art and life have been a critical influence in my development as a musician. Tom is one of those guys that even when they are totally wrong there is still something worth to ponder carefully; even on a bad day he is a provocative and original improviser. On top form he is one of the best saxophone players I’ve ever seen.
Sur la pente du talus les anges tournent leurs robes de laine dans les herbages d’acier et d’émeraude.
After all these years this is our first duo release. In a total Rimbaudian fashion, it was unplanned, unprepared and recorded extremely fast, making use of some extra studio time left after Tom’s Solo album. This is all the music we played. Unedited, mixed quickly and sequenced exactly as it was recorded. Focused on producing and releasing Tom’s album I almost forgot about it until a few weeks later when I listened to it accidentally while looking for the original tracks of Solo.
How wrong I was neglecting it. I love the immediacy and rawness of the music, the fragmented syntax, how a certain feeling of exhaustion filters through the incandescent playing. Profoundly imperfect and strange.
Biographies
Àlex Reviriego plays double bass, organ and electronics. He is a solo artist and member of the bands Phicus, Tholos Gateway, the Liba Villavecchia Trio and The Devil, Probably, among others, and one of the most active and in-demand musicians of the experimental music scene in Spain. As a contrabassist with a great command of extended techniques and timbric exploration of the instrument, he has participated in a great number of formations of contemporary, improvised and experimental music. His ferocious and angular style can be heard in dozens of albums released in various European labels as well as in different live settings, ranging from solo, small formations to orchestral work. His versatility has also allowed him to embrace a vast variety of styles like black metal, free improvisation,
ambient electronics or experimental folk.
His solo bass work explores the timbric possibilities of the unaccompanied double bass, focusing on extended bowing techniques and slow repetitive developments. Raben (Tripticks Tapes 2021) is the second instalment of a trilogy started with Blaue Tauben (Sirulita 2019), loosely based around the figures of Georg Trakl, Paul Celan and Friedrich Hölderlin.
His electronic compositions investigate the possibilities created by the juxtaposition of feedbacking devices with acoustic (Dorothea, Finis Africae 2022) and electronic instruments (Leukolenos, Crystalmine 2023).
He has collaborated with artists like Vasco Trilla, Patrick Shiroishi, Miguel A. Garcia, Martin Küchen, Alfredo Costa Monteiro, Ilia Belorukov, or Colin Marston, among many others. His work as performer and composer appears in dozens of albums released in labels like Astral Spirits, Clean Feed, Cyclic Law, Intonema, Tripticks Tapes, Urpa i Musell, etc.
He runs the experimental tape label Hera Corp.
Tom Chant (b. Dublin 1975) is a saxophonist and composer from London living in Barcelona. Tom focuses mainly on free improvised music which he has been involved in for 30 years.
In the mid 90’s Tom started attending Maggie Nicols’ Gathering sessions and continued for many years with Maggie giving Tom his first concert. He has worked with Eddie Prévost and John Edwards since 1997 and with them has recorded four records and toured festivals around the world. He has recorded with the London Improvisers Orchestra, Otomo Yoshihide, Angharad Davies, Sharif Sehnoui, Lê Quan Ninh, Susana Santos Silva, Ferran Fages and many others, while playing
concerts with a host of well known and not so well known musicians. Tom’s current practice concerns the entropy of technique and the spaces that this leaves for new vocabularies and dialogues.
