Gavin Bryars - A Listening Room (Chambre d'écoute) [CD]

During the late 1960s and through the 1970s Gavin Bryars taught in art colleges and throughout his career he has collaborated with many visual artists such as Bruce McLean, Tim Head, Bill Woodrow and Will Alsop. He worked closely with the late Juan Muñoz, notably on 'A Man in a Room, Gambling' - also recorded on GB Records. He has made installations/performances for the Liverpool Tate Gallery, the Tate St Ives, Tate Modern and, in 1993 a special project in the amazing Chateau d'Oiron in western France. This is a "listening room", an installation that takes the form of an acoustic map of the chateau. For this, specific music was written in order to establish the architectural acoustic of each space and to animate the spaces in which the music was played. This was recorded ambisonically and a listening room was established in the chateau where the listener can hear the natural acoustic of each source room. This room is, therefore, both a map of the space and a space in itself. Along with Gavin Bryars himself, there are two members of his own ensemble, and his own sound designer and engineer. In addition he uses the village band (La Fanfare d'Oiron) accepting the eccentricities of their performance, and adding three players to the ensemble for two rooms. <p>This recording is a unique record of that installation, which has played in the chateau since 1993, and has also been exhibited at the 2006 Alvar Aalto Architecture Symposium and in the Musée d'Angers, France - an exhibition devoted to major British sculpture in the French National Collection, and this work is included in that category! <p>Personnel: Gavin Bryars, Dave Smith, Roger Heaton, Chris Ekers, members of the Oiron village band