The manifesto from the Vernacular Social Club, a website online celebrating the existence and proliferation of one and all photographs. They also have a very informative podcast The Photo Vault. It focuses on the collection of photos but not in the traditional sense. I'm sure I'm infected with the virus but by a relative strain.
Here is what they say:
From the summit of the vernacular, we send out a rallying call to unite. All of us, champions of domestic, utilitarian, and local photographs that, over time, shed light on our society of the 20th and 21st centuries. Together, bringing the Vernacular Social Club to life means giving visibility to these undocumented archives, “de-conforming” the field to give cachet to the realm of the anonymous, to those “out of order” images.
We want to create an international club, inclusive both geographically and socially, as a place to share thoughts and ideas, open to everyone.
We want to propagate the vernacular document as expressions of social, societal, political, and artistic themes.
Our objective is to make the club a visually-rich sanctum by pooling the technical and artistic expertise of its members, as well as their archival, documentary, and financial resources.
Members can contribute directly to the club’s artistic and editorial production. They can also become benefactors and patrons.
Our underlying line of action is to promote the image in all its forms, without excluding texts and exegeses dealing with all types of subjects.
The club’s mission is to realize editorial projects, organize conferences, exhibitions, etc., and support its members’ initiatives and projects.
To promote the vernacular document, several mediums have been put in place: the magazine “REVU” with three annual issues and the creation and distribution of audio and video content.
The Vernacular Social Club is a cultural and non-profit association. An annual membership fee is required for those wishing to be members. Special financial or administrative support is provided to members who are economically disadvantaged or in need of specific aid.
Always intrigued by Courvoisier's sound and improvisational abilities, this year's release Chimaera gathers a great group of experimental musicians and everything appears to work almost perfectly. But her previous work as a side-person and leader also hold many lovely surprises worth listening to. Inspired by Odilon Redon's advance works with mystical undertones, it makes sense why the music has a special appeal for me. My gut reaction is that this music should have wide appeal bot because of its pacing and use of variety of instruments. In the end its the journey you take listening to the progressions of ideas and musical interplay.
In the liner notes to the CD, Courvoisier explains “I wanted something super lyrical, super poetic, and super fragile. In Redon’s drawing and painting, I can imagine, see, and feel everything. Chimaera is a project that has more groove, where I stay a longer time with one musical idea. Much of the music is written, as always, but here I also allow myself to just vamp. That’s why all the pieces are really long, because of their slow, dreamlike development.” Pieces are built in diaphanous layers that stretch out with a measured melodicism built from soaring, translucent piano harmonies; Gress and Wollesen’s open, floating pulse; countering warmly burred, paired trumpet lines; and the shimmering timbres of processed guitar and electronics. Themes weave in and out of the collective flow, acting as anchors for the unhurried free lyricism of the expansive ensemble improvisations.
The choice of instrumentation and musicians is integral to the success of the project. The leader’s crystalline piano playing melds luxuriant, harmonic voicings, inside-piano textures, and open angular lines. Wollesen’s understated drumming guides the underlying pulse to the pieces, often switching to vibraphone where the resonant, metallic sonorities serve as an effective complement to Courvoisier’s piano. The pairing of Wooley and Smith is distinctive. Wooley’s role is to stay closer to the compositions and his clarion tone and extended shadings ebb and flow, coalescing with Smith’s soaring, rounded exclamations. Gress’s bass playing is used to both fill out the bottom registers of the ensemble while providing a poised voice to the mix. The addition of Christian Fennesz is particularly inspired. His variegated electronics and processed guitar invest the lush voicings with glitched granularity, adding a strident edge to the improvisations. Where the playing of the other musicians is more linear, Fennesz’s playing provides changeable scrims of bristling layered activity.
On the heels of The Rite of Spring, a classical/improvised jazz piano hybrid recorded at four hands with Cory Smythe, Swiss-born pianist Sylvie Courvoisier releases the double-disc Chimera, inspired by the art of French Symbolist Odilon Redon. The stunning batch of new compositions is brought to life by a sextet comprised of her regular trio mates, bassist Drew Dress and drummer Kenny Wollesen, plus a powerful trumpet frontline with creatives Wadada Leo Smith and Nate Wooley, and Austrian guitarist Christian Fennesz providing unexpected atmospherics to the mix.
The music provides a deep sense of fantasy and reverie from where the group’s understated, sometimes esoteric side comes out. Melodies gently float above, ascending higher, and then landing on ambiguous realms. These can be lulling, descriptive, and hypnotic until the group pulls the rug out with brief blasts of avant-garde jazz. The opener, “Le Pavot Rouge”, sets the tone, introduced by beautiful bass playing before pulsing with a world music-inspired disposition. Intermittent distorted guitar chords immersed in reverb and other ethereal effects intermingle with the piano riff, while the trumpeters complement each other with undisturbed lines and high-pitched moans. The second half of the piece, which spans over 21 minutes, itakes on a darker and more mysterious tone without losing its fragility or pathos. It ultimately concludes with the same amiable sense of hope that it began with.
Duration can be a double-edged sword. When it’s handled wrong, longer-form music can just feel long. And in an age when a preponderance of music is served up in three or four minute-long bites, a tune doesn’t need to be too long to feel like a bit of a chew. But duration can justify itself by allowing a listener to untether the listening experience from recognizing structural elements and marking their repetitions. That’s certainly the case with the music on Chimaera, the debut album by a combo led by Sylvie Courvoisier that bears the same name.
Chimaera is an outgrowth of Courvoisier’s trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wolleson. To their number she added Nate Wooley, who brings a deep bag of extended trumpet techniques and an even deeper interrogative spirit, and Christian Fennesz, whose application of electronics can transform the sound of his guitar beyond recognition. And for this session, she added another trumpeter, Wadada Leo Smith.
One might expect a band named after a fire-breathing, two-headed beast to singe some ear hairs, but that’s not really the case. It’s more likely that the Swiss-born pianist and composer, who has been based in Brooklyn since the late 1990s, chose it for its mythological dimension. The album’s compositions were inspired by the paintings of Odilon Redon, a direct predecessor of surrealism. Their length permits the listener to be simply be present as the music manifests in diaphanous layers of color and forms that are perceptible, but not always recognizable. Gress begins “Le Pavot Rouge,” the album’s opening track, with a questioning, bluesy figure introduction. In short order, he parts a veil of shimmering piano and vibraphone (Wollesen plays vibraphone as drum kit much of the time, which substantially shifts the weight and character of sound away from piano trio conventions), and then takes up a spare, abstracted tango rhythm. Over the next 20 minutes, musicians enter and exit the action. One trumpet takes up the querying vibe, and the other resolves it. The guitar floats dubby echoes over the pulse. Courvoisier darts out of the vibes at double speed, or complicates some brass harmonies with spare dissonant notes.