L'Ocelle Mare (fr)

 

Thomas Bonvalet aka l'Ocelle Mare, is a French self-taught multi-instrumentalist. Bonvalet was the guitar player of the band Cheval de frise between 1998 and 2004. He gradually began straying from the guitar and started to integrate percussion instruments. Foot-tapping and various wind, mechanical elements, and stray amped-up objects. This formed the guiding principle of his solo project, L’ocelle mare, initiated in 2005, and continues to form the core of his instrumentation.

Most recently, Bonvalet collaborated with Powerdove, Arlt, Radikal Satan, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Arnaud Rivière, Will Guthrie, Gaspar Claus, Daunik Lazro, Fred, and Sylvain Lemètre.

 

Mariachi (fr)

 

Mariachi is the Parisian guitarist Nina Garcia’s solo project. Mariachi experiments between improvised and noise music. Her setup is very minimal: one guitar, one pedal and an amp. Everything is focused on the gesture and the sound research of the instrument: it’s resonances, limits, expansions, impurities, all the audible parts of the guitar. You’ll probably find: feedback, crackling, short circuits, impacts, harmonics, grindings noises, overflowing, notes and an almost perfect chord.

Her setup might sound classical nowadays, however Nina Garcia makes it sound unheard of. Her first LP was released in October 2018 on No Lagos Musique and Doubtful Sounds. She also plays in the band Mamiedaragon, in duet with trombonist Maria Bertel (Selvhenter, Ymers Pizza) and with drummer Augustin Bette.

 

Tachycardie (fr)

 

Tachycardie is the solo project of the French Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy, musician, composer, and drummer of the explosive duo of Noise-Rock PNEU.

At the heart of Tachycardie’s exploration is musical language and transmission itself. He explores subjects such as the dichotomy between oral transmission and written notation, the division between popular and scholarly music and the contrast between recording and performance. The result is a personal and introspective synthesis. Through his percussion and drums, one can hear concrete and minimalist influences.

His obsession with rhythm tends to test the endurance of the body but also that of the listener by imposing radical lengthy recordings and using harsh sound materials with a sometimes atonal or dissonant aspect. He aims to accelerate the listener’s heartbeat and to use repetitiveness to make us perceive the enlargement of the auditory perception so that the slightest changes in the repetition become audible.

His collective, improvised, and experimental writing includes collaborations with Pneu, La Colonie de Vacances, Binidu, Futuroscope, and The Missing Night.