AUDREY CHEN / PHIL MINTON
(voices)
With primary focus on the interplay between the uttered sounds of the mouth and vocal chords, Minton and Chen plumb the depths of their most inherent and bodily instruments. Their improvisations are fearless, fragile, hungry, passionate, riotous, ululating and animalistic, yet are also in all respects, human. They express, pronounce and intensely articulate (in their fashion) the many nuanced shades of their individual and collaborative conditions.
".......For those two voices interpenetrate to produce a more complex song. It’s a single voice branching out. Here, what the voice produces is actually what singing has not explored, what has been left behind as something impure or non-complying. Something similar can be brightly heard in Scelsi’s vocal pieces. There is also a similarity with the complex vocal works (the logatomes) Léo Kupper extensively produced in the mid-‘60s.
At times, the music seems to lead us to a meaning that is deeper than the textual level. Or is it the depth of another possible song? That’s when the music takes us to areas that seem closer to the sacred, left untouched by mediation, even slightly incomprehensible, though mostly ambivalent and reality-piercing.
Both voices in interaction, perpetually urging the other on, producing more than their simple addition, producing a third voice – like a semi-autonomous organism – very difficult to explain how – why – as if what had been mostly deeply burrowed was surfacing. An UR-song, like Schwitters’ UR-sonate. Something basal – though from an uncharted base. Music that should be listened to before one even perceives the slightest melody. An infra-song that encompasses everything including the comical, the grotesque, the exacerbation of a mood, and the extreme pain that obscurely lives inside all of us. Everything comes up effortlessly....." ---- Guy -Marc Hinant (Subrosa Editions)
Chen and Minton have been performing as a duo for more than a decade with concerts/tours in Europe, the US, China, Argentina and Brazil. Their duo album, By the Stream, was released by SUBROSA in 2013.
https://www.subrosa.net/en/catalogue/soundworks/phil-minton--audrey-chen.html
http://www.popmatters.com/review/171884-phil-minton-audrey-chen-by-the-stream/
