A 5-CD boxed set featuring the collaborative work that the BarDem duo (Vincent Barras & Jacques Demierre) has been carrying out for several years with Swiss and international artists, on the margins of the traditional categories of literature, poetry, performing arts and music.
The duo Vincent Barras & Jacques Demierre extends an experimental tradition of sound and poetry at the boundaries of established categories such as literature, scenic arts and music.
The spoken word as medium of poetic expression constitutes the very material of their work, based both on poetic techniques (syntactic, lexical, phonemic and prosodic development) and music (time structures, timbres, sequences, superpositions). The writing, in four hands, is done simultaneously in pencil and on the mic: listening, transcribing, mouthing, recording, re-listening.
The detailed analysis of speech, its rearrangement and re-composition, takes form in a single text-score whose ultimate end is its embodiment on stage in concrete dimensions: the space of a body, the time of a performance.
Vincent Barras (born 1956 in Switzerland), historian of science, performer and translator, is the author of solo and group performances, lectures and writings on the history of the body and medicine, poetry, music and contemporary art.
Jacques Demierre (born 1954 in Geneva) is a pianist, composer and improviser, author of solo and group concerts and sound performances, radio plays, collaborative performances and site-specific installations. He has collaborated with artists (Chris Mann,
Caroline Bergvall, Christian Kesten), choreographers (Cindy van Acker, Noemi Lapzeson) and numerous musicians (
Axel Dörner,
Jonas Kocher,
Fritz Hauser, Sainkho Namtchylak, Irène Schweizer,
John Butcher,
Brandon LaBelle,
Jason Kahn, Butch Morris, Roger Turner,
Okkyung Lee, Peter Evans, Carlos Zingaro, Gunter Müller, Jaap Blonk, Barry Guy, Sylvie Courvoisier,
Han Bennink…).
