French guitarist Ivann Cruz is known from his work with the Lille-based experimental, free-improvisation trio TOC (with pianist Jérémie Ternoy and drummer Peter Orins). His new solo project «Lignes de Fuites» (roughly translated as Leakage Lines), recorded between 2009 and 2016, adds another personal dimension to Cruz unique approach to the guitar – the electric and acoustic ones – as a leading instrument and as a sound generator.
Four extended pieces on «Lignes de Fuites» suggest complex, fluid architecture where the improvising, effects-laden guitar of Cruz interacts with voice and percussion sonic elements and structures arresting, heavily-processed soundscapes. The fifth, concise piece is a solo miniature played on the acoustic guitar. In a way, Cruz questions in these pieces the essence of artistic act. Is it capturing the sonorous world composed in the moment? Or is the instrumental gesture constrained by the environment in which they are unfold?
The opening «L’obscur aliment des signes» (The obscure food of signs) uses one of Argentinian poet Roberto Juarroz «vertical» poem, read by Cruz himself, and wraps the poetic texts with nuanced, ethereal layers of processed, mutated and atmospheric-noisy sounds programmed by Olivier Lautem and Loïc Reboursière that intensifies the cryptic-poetic inspiration of this pieces. The following «Etat d’urgence» (Emergency state) offers a haunting, urban narrative, energized by the fractured pulse provided by Orins that in its turn stresses the turbulent-disturbing spirit of this piece. The title-piece, the only piece dated from 2009, served as a short, emotional interlude between the dense and processed longer soundscapes. «Quantophrénie» places Cruz effects-laden guitar as contrasting, provoking and sculpting a mixture of close and distant voices, eventually joining their chaotic, unintelligible meeting of speech acts with its own, highly personal syntax. This unique and arresting sonic journey ends with «Attente précaire» (Precarious waiting), another collaboration with Orins, but this time in a quiet and minimalist, mysterious drone that is disturbed occasionally by sudden, arbitrary acoustic sounds.
Eyal Hareuveni
Ivann Cruz (g, v), Peter Orins (dr), Olivier Lautem (prog), Loïc Reboursière (prog), Muriel Cocquet (v), Cristina Decoberq (v), Odile Dewever (v), Martin Granger (v), Antoine Hermelle (v), Savina Topurska (v), Laura Wateaux (v)
