Guitar, amp, electronics – Thierry Monnier & Bruce Russell
Recording on February 23, 2020
Lyttelton, NZ
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Together with Thierry, just before his departure, we, some of his close friends, decided to realise this record. A promise and a desire to be able to listen to these electric exchanges engraved on vinyl. This record was made possible thanks to a subscription and various donations. Any profits from sales will be donated to 102 rue d’Alembert in Grenoble.
For many he was the person at the other end of the phone or email at Metamkine’s. For others he was the voice of experimental music on Radio Campus and an imaginative, considerate and tenacious programmer at Le 102 in Grenoble. He also was this diligent companion with whom to attend festivals, share enthusiasm about a performance, or the beer and conversation we’d rather have during the next one. He additionally was the hands and brains of Doubtful Sounds, the catalogue of which label demonstrates the highest of eclectic standards, the will to support comrade artists to the further end of their experimentations, and an authentic passion for the record medium. Lastly, he was of course one of the two guitars of Sun Stabbed, a member of La Morte Young, and a solo artist we would not have mind getting more performances and record releases from. In those, he was exploring the possibilities of the prepared guitar with modesty and an infinite patience, occasionally combining it with dictaphone or Revox-size magnetic tape.
[…]
While he would appear as an indoorsy creature, Thierry had developed a passion for New-Zealand that fed off a combine taste for geography, anthropology, and the very distinctive manner of handling guitars that a handful of experimenters have developed since the 1990s. This other side of the world had become the destination of some of his travels, and Bruce Russell (The Dead C), Michael Morley (The Dead C, Gate) or Stefan Neville (Pumice) some of his friends, with whom to spend some time, share an improvisation, or work on a record project.
[…]
For all of us who were around until the end, these notes and gritty vibrations sound even stranger. They resonate with the serenity and temperance with which he was able to reassure us even more than we were able to support him. They resonate with his curiosity and his ability to pick up significance in the detail of a sound, a sentence, or a landscape, against the vast inanity of the world. Thierry had dedicated a lot of his life, attention, and intelligence to music, but he knew, in the end, that music is not that important. Thierry had chosen music as a way of making his own way, building friendships, keeping away from the thickheadedness and lack of imagination of a failing capitalist society. Thierry had chosen guitar against the macho and egotistic postures, just to share his wonderment when a little (or a lot) of electric magic gets out of it. I believe he would have appreciated that some of his relation to life would be seen in his relation to the instrument.
Poroporoaki, Teremoana.
Pali Meursault
(Profile published in Revue & Corrigée #122, September 2022)
Thierry loved New Zealand, and even seemed to find New Zealanders pretty agreeable. Although we first met in France, I’d seen him in NZ a couple of times, so when he suggested we use his summer 2020 visit to record some material it seemed like a nice plan. Of course I had no idea what was ahead. The recording was done in the new sleep-out/studio we had recently finished in the back yard, a simple process that took about an hour. Thierry had to get to grips with the amplifier I lent him, which was not quite what he was used to, but I thought he got some great sounds out of it in the end. After he left for the North Island, COVID suddenly became a massive problem, and he was very lucky to get home before we locked up the whole country for months. But then he got sick again with something much worse than COVID, and it turned out that these sessions were actually a memorial to his last visit to the Antipodes. An entirely fitting memorial to a great friend of New Zealand, and I’m proud to say, a friend of mine too.
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