Unexpected Visitor

Very excited about this new release with my good friend and bass player Gus Garside.

The album has been released by New York label 577, and you can stream it on bandcamp, or listen using the player below.

Meeting for the first time as an acoustic duo in their collaborative album, The Unexpected Visitor, UK-based musicians Gus Garside and Hervé Perez explore the musical interpretations of a 13th Century Poem, “The Guest House” by Rumi. The album captures a series of improvisations played between March and May 2020, before and during the official UK lockdowns, some recorded in the same room together, some individually by each musician at home. This album is a selection of music from their original session and their telematic at-home improvisations, woven together by Rumi’s naturally evolving poetic narrative. Informed by the practice of deep listening, the musicians composed the album with angular melodic lines and abstract passages, exploring the resonant qualities and structural design of the saxophone and double bass. The tracks offer reflective and inviting duets, embodying the transient curiosity and sincere openness of the poem they’re inspired by, “This being human is a guest house / Every morning a new arrival.” 

credits

released February 20, 2021

Gus Garside  – Double bass
Hervé Perez –  Saxophone

Recorded by Hervé Perez & Gus Garside, in March-May 2020 
The first session recorded in Brighton, UK. Subsequent sessions recorded with both players in their own homes, while improvising in real time online, connected via low-latency software.

Mixed and mastered by Hervé Perez at nexttime studios

Photo by Hervé Perez
Album design by Mark Smith

All music by Gus Garside (PRS) and Hervé Perez, 2020

Reviews

“/ The Unexpected Visitor / is a conceptual work of excellent workmanship… in which the evident skills of the two musicians are effortlessly highlighted.”

“Gus Garside and * Hervé Perez * must be given credit for having recreated a coherent and full-bodied sound flow, where almost all the pieces of the mosaic are in their place.”

Giuseppe Vitale – radioaktiv.it

“The bass and sax duo are highly practised improvisers who bring an atmospheric clarity to their music that reflects their close heeding of each other.  There are also less-tangible selections that replicate and resonate the inherent mood of what this music is about…

This music is contemplative and peace-making and I think it appropriately reflects spiritual concerns.”

Ken Cheetham – Jazzviews

“The key to such enjoyment rests with the playing of Garside and Perez, their listening and reacting to one another, their empathy and mutual respect. Both players are fluent and fluid on their instruments, adept at producing melodic passages and deep rich tones, leading to some exquisite exchanges between them. When the occasion arises, they can each veer off to explore the outer limits of the capabilities of those instruments rather than always remaining in safe territory. The combination of all these ingredients is an album of great variety which handsomely repays repeated listening and seems guaranteed to do so for years. This should not be this duo’s only recording.”

John Eyles – All About Jazz

“Perez’s wide drones and sul tasto buzzes from Garside push the sequence to its furthest, most multiphonic reaches without losing close communication. From that point on the duo alternates between stretches of barely-there sequences to lyrical motifs that feature clarion reed peeps and cello-pitched string rubs in sequence exploration.”

Ken Waxman – Squid’s Ear

Cet Unexpected Visitor est plutôt du côté jazz libre dans un magnifique dialogue entre la contrebasse puissante et charnue sans chichi de Gus Garside et les spirales subtiles du sax ténor d’Hervé Perez dans les arcanes des modes et des possibilités mélodiques qui en découlent….

De son excellente technique et de sa connaissance des structures musicales, Hervé Perez crée un univers chaleureux et introspectif autour de liens mélodiques subtils, tirant parti de chaque couleur propre aux intervalles sans à-coup, la surprise se révélant une fois le rêve estompé.  Qu’il lui livre discrètement un écrin ou qu’il s’agite  à frictionner les cordes sur la touche en zig-zags énergiques (03 The Lover), le jeu profond et la pensée musicale de Gus Garside s’applique à démultiplier ses propositions afin d’enrichir la palette collective du duo, les occurrences du développement musical, les options qui alimentent inlassablement, l’intérêt de celui qui écoute, médite, s’émerveille.

 Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg – Orynx

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Jalal al-Din Rumi

Résonance #10 [nt028]

Résonance documents a series of live improvisations on laptop. The performances feature field recordings and electronic elements, beats, and digital processing.

Location recordings include resonant spaces that add their own colour to the existing soundscape, sounds of the five elements (TCM, qi gong), natural and environmental sounds, found sounds etc.
The sound design focuses on sculpting the natural resonant frequencies of recorded sounds, as well as textural and gestural qualities.

The work is grounded in electroacoustic tradition and draws from experimental electronic music, with a strong focus on deep listening. Every performance is entirely improvised.

**

One year on, a new listening meditation performed at the Sheffield Buddhist Centre to experienced meditators. The practice based on nada, the sound of silence, invites the audience to use the continuously evolving soundscape as support for meditation. Bringing the awareness to details and texture or to the entire balance of sounds and its evolving narrative bears similarities with mindfulness of breathing. One aims to become immersed in the sonic world presented, in all its details, and also observe the interaction between parts and the unfolding narrative.

This performance is a good example of the use of electroacoustic material; a more minimal approach than in experimental contexts. The focus is on the resonant frequencies of the five elements, beat frequencies, entrainment, and deep listening to field recordings of natural sounds.

Résonance #9 [nt027]

Résonance documents a series of live improvisations on laptop. The performances feature field recordings and electronic elements, beats, and digital processing.

Location recordings include resonant spaces that add their own colour to the existing soundscape, sounds of the five elements (TCM, qi gong), natural and environmental sounds, found sounds etc.
The sound design focuses on sculpting the natural resonant frequencies of recorded sounds, as well as textural and gestural qualities.

The work is grounded in electroacoustic tradition and draws from experimental electronic music, with a strong focus on deep listening. Every performance is entirely improvised.

**

Starting a new phase in the development of electroacoustic material, those two performances come after a break from solo sets. Meanwhile, i have been generating material and adapting my electroacoustic range of sounds for the group Inclusion Principle. My approach to sound sculpture has gradually been focusing on minimal detail. The harmonic contents are simpler, to fit with other instruments, but also to hone in on particular frequencies and highlighting details of interaction, phase relations and interference patterns – beats.

By creating space, the focus shifts towards relations and the notion of distance and perspective. The texture, tonality and gestural quality of natural sounds is very much present, but we are delving deeper into the essential quality of sound, into the vibrational universe.

This spaciousness, and the invitation to practice deep listening naturally leads to the pratice of meditation and mindfulness through listening. So it felt right to present this work as nada, the sound of silence, and invite the audience to meditate using soundscapes as support of concentration; using the traditional meditation practice (also used by composer Pauline Oliveiros) that alternates and merges the close listening to detail with the awareness of the overal shape of our entire aural experience.

In a sense, i feel that this work, from the beginning, has been pointing in this direction, with the sculpting of field recordings aiming to bring attention to the very core, the vibrational quality, the very architectural characteristic of the reality we experience as sound. Similarly, the use of five elements, borrowed from spiritual practice and TCM also points to the internal working of natural balance. Sound as a metaphor for the nature of reality. Everything is sound.