On the occasion of unPublic's tenth anniversary, Radio TT-Node broadcasted the 100 hours of recordings of 10 years of unPublic, on line, on FM and on DAB.

And here is the link to the 100th edition:

6 min read 🤓

Ethereal Reverberations. A Decade of unPublic
(« Dix ans qu'on fait la musique sans public »)

23 november, 2023

On the 18th of October 2023 it was exactly a decade ago that in the confines of Marie Latrou's small Parisian pottery workshop (and a little later that same evening back in the messy storage room of La Générale Nord-Est, then still located avenue Parmentier in Paris's eleventh arrondissement), we serendipitously initiated our series of speculative no-one-but-us-sees-nor-hears concerts: unPublic. In that 2013 inaugural edition Rébus & I teamed up with Jean Bordé in an improvised, say, FreeMuSonic meet with pianist Yoko Miura, who was visiting from Japan (as she had been doing annually, at the very least since 2008, and continues to do) and composer Doanh Tri Minh from Vietnam.

From that Friday on, until the day of this writing, there have been 100 editions of unPublic.

We celebrated the fruits and joys of these past ten years with a one hundredth unPublic event on that Wednesday of October 18th, 2023, exactly ten years after the journey began. Again La Générale Nord-Est provided the playground (be it this time in the 14th arrondissement, where the collective relocated almost four years ago). And quite rightly so, as for 42 out of the 99 uP's up to that day, La Générale Nord-Est served as base.

That's in almost half of all cases

Jubilations kicked off two days earlier. Starting 00:00 on Monday, October 16th, radio TT-node broadcasted the 99 hours, 49 minutes, and 58 seconds—a mere 10 minutes short of 100 hours—stream of recordings, constituting the first 99 unPublic albums. All of the 541 tracks that make them up, in the course of four full days passed online, FM, DAB... Starting with the first track, uP 1, ending with the 541st one, uP 537 and with the 539 other tracks in between, in some randomly picked order. (That is how I'd like a full rendition, complete and unabridged, of uP to be 'performed'.)

The festive 100th uP in La G's black box had fifteen participants, and all were invited to sign the whiteboard: Uspudo, Miwa Color, Mr. Lili, JJ Gantesque, Claude Parle, me, Lawrence Casserly, Rébus, Yungwei Chen, Gaël Segalen, Yoko Miura, Christine Böll, Marc Plas, Doro Dimanta, Arno Bisselbach.

Signing the whiteboard was the first invitation to join in one of the party's games. The second one: pick up some paper bags from the plastic box with the many, many that I had brought along. I started collecting paper bags, I think, about a year ago. Keeping them whenever I got them in some shop or other, instead of throwing them in the paper recycling bin. For no other reason than to some day have a group of people do a collective performance in which they pick them up one by one, inflate them and then 💥pop💥 them.

It is thus that the 100th uP sessions began with the resounding bursts of paper bags being inflated and popped, resembling miniature explosions, instant spikes, that intertwined with Yoko's piano playing, that in turn was captured and treated by Lawrence Casserley's electronics, Lawrence who had come over especially from Oxford to join us in the celebrations. (That was an immense honour. Thank you so much again, Lawrence.)
The result of all that blowing and popping: the premiere of 'Blast' (uP 539 on the documentary album).

"What can we expect? What does it signify? What is the meaning? Bloated and popped paper bags, the sound of explosions..."   ( * )

Though originally far from intended that way, little by little, edition after edition, unPublic grew to become (or: for me it became) a major memory machine: an evolving and unending soundtrack to our life's maelstrom of things and events, from 2013 onward. It reflects many of the changes that occurred, is strongly coloured by individual pre-occupations and interests, by places that Rébus and I visited, together and individually, by the artists that in the course of the years we met, that came, and in many cases, then left again, because life lead us and/or them elsewhere.

It thus is a history, and as such also testimony and testament.

Each uP edition has its own story. Sometimes that story has some exotic and quite unusual angles; at other times the story is just an ordinary one, though then again special in its simple day-to-day-ness. But always the story is unique, rooted as it is in a particular point in our times & spaces. Also, each uP edition connects to the others. It points onwards in time, to editions still forthcoming; and it reaches backwards, to editions that have been. Many of them connect through an identity in place. And some connect through the identities & personalities of participating players, via their instruments, and via the sounds that they made and used. There is two red threads that link them all. First is that in each of the editions, there is always either me or ( ** ) Rébus playing us all archived recordings. And second, all 100 archived recordings were edited by me. Which makes that, on top of the undisputed creative collectiveness, each of the albums to me also very much 'feels' like a personal, an individual, statement. Maybe comparable, indeed, to that of a curator.

Hence it is a singular, long lasting and continuously evolving piece of music. A fluid mosaïc made up of a great many smallish parts; mosaic, that continues to expand, and all the time rearranges itself (see the rule of random playback between fixed poles, mentioned above.)

...

[ the story continues]

...

notes __ ::
(*) In case these phrases somehow sound familiar, it probably is because you know the song 'Paper Hats' by This Heat, from their album Deceit. I actually mis-remembered the song's title. Thought it was 'Paper Bags', until I looked it up to check the lyrics... [ ^ ]
(**) The 'or' here is the inclusive one: most of the time, to be precise, in 71 of the 100 editions the two of us were playing; Rébus did the uP edition without me 5 out of the 100 times ; and I did the uP edition without Rébus 24 out of the 100 times. [ ^ ]

tags: unPublic

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