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Hyper Hyper!
Gabrielle Weber
Hyper Hyper!? Hyper Duo masters the art of escalation to excess. Pianist Gilles Grimaitre and percussionist Julien Mégroz consistently focus on energy, rhythm and satire. There seem to be no musical styles nor performance boundaries for the duo. Moving between classical avant-garde and pop-rock, Hyper Duo transcends common perceptions in a playful and humorous way. Their new programme Hyper Grid will be premiered at the Gare du Nord – Bahnhof für Neue Musik Basel.
The two artists define Hyper Duo as ‘experimental band’. Julien Mégroz comes from Lausanne and after studying there, he specialised in contemporary music at Basel’s FHNW. Gilles Grimaitre, from Geneva, studied at Bern’s HKB and went on winning a scholarship at Frankfurt’s international Ensemble Moderne Akademie. Both describe themselves as performers, improvisers, composers as well as project inventors.
Overcoming stylistic and genre boundaries and expanding horizons is the central focus of their duo, always in close collaboration with other artists and musicians. Energetic and humorous, Hyper Duo moves between traditional composition from the classical avant-garde, rocking electro-energy and absurd poetry. They draw inspiration both from popular and cultivated music.
New pieces for their chosen instrumentation as well as modern classics, supplemented with experimental electronics, video or even objects, form the musical core, with compositions provided by likeminded musicians or themselves.
Several Hyper programmes already stand for the unconventional approach to traditional concert formats, bearing titles like Hyper Cut, Hyper Stuck, Hyper Fuzz oder Hyper Rift.
Hyper Rift, Trailer ©Musikfestival Bern 2020
Hyper Rift, for example, consisted in a light and sound installation controlled by seismographic data at the Bern 2020 Music Festival. During a live performance inside Bern’s Monbijou Bridge, the duo, together with video artist Pascal Meury, made tectonic shifts audible and tangible. With percussion and synthesizer, they also pushed the volume to a limit just tolerable.
In Hyper Temper, a trio programme with percussionist Miguel Angel Garcia Martin, the two questioned the grand piano as instrument for its role in the music business, music history, but also as an everyday life object. In Cathy van Eck’s ‘pièce d’ameublement‘, it became an ornamental plant-bearing piece of furniture and thus symbol of bourgeois lifestyle in the 19th century.
In Hyper Grid, the two now perform again on their core instruments – amplified piano, drumset and electronics – as a follow up to their previous projects Hyper Fuzz and Hyper Cut.
Hyper Cut humorously complemented drumset, piano and electronics with video, voice and objects in new works by Simon Steen-Andersen, Sarah Nemtsov or Wolfgang Heiniger, among others.
Hyper Duo: Hyper Cut, Simon Steen-Andersen, difficulties putting it into practice, Video ©Hyper Duo
The Hyper Fuzz project, on the other hand, combined new, explicitly groovy pieces and modern classics with references to pop, rock and jazz, supplemented with electronic interludes by young Swiss sound inventor Cyrill Lim. Works by Frank Zappa, who himself combined electronic and electronic music in aesthetic projects, were heard alongside music by Stockhausen or young Lausanne composer Nicolas von Ritter. The programme was performed in classical concert halls and festivals as well as in rock and jazz clubs.
Hyper Duo / Hyper Fuzz @Taktlos Festival Zürich 2018, Video ©Hyper Duo
In the new project, Hyper Duo deepens its collaboration with two artists:
Serbian composer Marko Nikodijevic, who joins them himself on electronics for the world premiere of his grid/index [ I ] for the Hyper Duo. In his works, Nikodijevic likes to combine traditional instruments with digital sounds, using techno and pop techniques. Grid / index [ I ] is based on a work of the same name by artist Carsten Nicolai, a huge collection of drawings of two-dimensional grids and patterns. Nikodijevic translates the reference into simple rhythmic and melodic patterns reminiscent of the so-called ‘minimal techno’ of the 90s.
Kevin Juillerat, composer from Lausanne, refers to Nikodijevic in his work L’Être-On. His piece is based on a text by the surreal poet Antonin Artaud from a radio programme the artist produced himself in the 1940s. Juillerat explores the analogy between poetry and sound, creating a rhythmic, electronics-infused half-hour ‘mini-oratorio’.
Kevin Juillerat, le vent d’orages lointains, for piano and strings, UA 2018
The two experimental musicians from the French-speaking part of Switzerland never fail to offer subversively funny but also musically poetic programmes, which is plain to see in their numerous videos. Whether hyper hyper can still be intensified is best determined live in the new programme Hyper Grid, on June 2, at the Gare du Nord and from November onwards at several other venues. Especially since live concerts are now possible again, after such a long time.
Gabrielle Weber
The Gare du Nord – Bahnhof für Neue Musik Basel invites ensembles from the French-speaking part of Switzerland during three seasons for the Focus Romandie series. Hyper Grid is the third and last programme of this first season.
The new works “L’Être-On” for amplified piano, percussion, voice and effect pedals by Kevin Juillerat and “grid/index [ I ]” for drumset, piano and electronics by Marko Nikodijevic will be premiered.
Concerts
2.6. 21 Gare du Nord Basel
4.11.21 IGNM Zürich
17.12.21 Salle Farel, Bienne
Indigne de nous, Hyper Duo’s first studio album will be released on June 5, 2021 by Everest Records.
Marko Nikodijevic, Frank Zappa, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Carsten Nicolai, Antonin Artaud, Sarah Nemtsov, Wolfgang Heiniger, Miguel Angel Garcia Martin
neo-Profiles:
HYPER DUO, Kevin Juillerat, Gilles Grimaitre, Julien Mégroz, Cathy van Eck, Simon Steen-Andersen, Cyrill Lim, Nicolas von Ritter, Gare du Nord
Forum for young female music inventors
Christian Fluri
Institutions meant to support young composers who have graduated or are about to graduate are very important, essential actually. With protonwerk, ensemble proton bern has operated groundbreakingly and achieved a great deal in this field, which can also be discovered on neo.mx3.ch. This year’s Musikforum Biel/Bienne, aiming to support orchestral music, will present works by Spanish composer Gemma Ragués Pujol, Swiss composer Michal Muggli and Armenian composer Argenaz Martirosyan in three world premieres with the Sinfonie Orchester Biel Solothurn directed by its principal conductor Kaspar Zehnder on May, 19. All three young composers currently live in Switzerland, are studying or have completed their studies here and already won various prizes for their high-quality works. They create music of great density and tension, with an independent language that is at the cutting edge of our time.
Order, Disruption, Deconstruction
The 30-year-old Michal Muggli, who grew up near Zurich, already has a large catalogue of works. She completed her studies under the supervision of Beat Furrer with a Master’s degree in Graz – after graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in composition with honours at Bern’s University of Arts two years earlier.
In 2014 she won protonwerk 4 with DICKdünn II for flute, lupophone, bass clarinet, violin, violoncello, harp, piano and conductor. The first part of the eight-minute piece is of gripping intensity, tonally dense and of demonic expression. The dense, earthy and progressive soundscape is broken down into individual, fragmentary figures, alternating with sombre, rebellious clusters. Muggli leads her music into a turmoil of overlapping spoken words voices, merging into instrumental speaking, sighing, lamenting. A convincing work that also tells the listeners more about Muggli’s artistic passions: music and literature. She is now studying French literature and language as well as musicology and hermeneutics.
Michal Muggli, DICKdünn II, UA ensemble proton Bern, UA 2014 Bern / 2015 St. Petersburg International New Music Festival
Her new orchestral piece, Unruh, which will be premiered at the Musikforum Biel/Bienne, is once more focussing on order – in this case of clock mechanics – and disruption. Muggli writes about her composition that ‘…seemingly uncontrolled excursions of a sprial spring’ maintain ‘the regulated order of the gears’. Subliminally, the restlessness (Unruhen) is rebelling against the mechanical order of the passing of time and thus keeps it going. In her music, Muggli develops a dialectical process that also lets the sound wander through the orchestra, as she puts it, for she is also concerned with the ever-new transfer of forces between the almost interlocked orchestra musicians. An arrangement that leads us to expect music of great tension.
East and West linked in the present
Zeitlos, the orchestral piece by the Armenian Argenaz Martirosyan not only revolves around time, but also seeks to explore the concept in its various semantic meanings. The clockwork mechanism also appears in this work, as do moments of eruption. Martirosyan writes of ‘liberated time’. Her music develops in a dialectic of standstill and movement, due to the different dimensions of time and the composer hopes that time will ‘fly by’ for the public.
An inner tension and profound sound exploration that form a stimulating musical speech, as well as a close relation to improvisation, can be heard in Music for Alto Saxophone and Percussions (2020).
Aregnaz Martirosyan, Musik for Saxophone and Percussions, UA Lucerne Percussions New Music Days 2020
In this piece, Martirosyan – who is currently studying with Swiss composer Dieter Ammann, at the Lucerne School of Music after a schooling in Armenia – combines in the realms of Eastern composing with its expansive sound structures, always moving in different harmonic areas, with the Western musical present, in order create her own powerful and stirringly rhythmic tonal language.
She skilfully develops her language in the large unit that is the orchestra. This is evident in Dreilinden for solo trumpet and orchestra from 2019, a gripping work of art that ensured her two renowned prizes.
Aregnaz Martirosyan, Dreilinden, Konzert for Solo Trumpet and Orchestra, UA 2019
Sound and movement
Le temps bouge mais n’avance pas, written for the Musikforum Biel/Bienne by Catalan composer Gemma Ragués Pujol is also dealing with the phenomenon of time. The composer states that time is always moving but never progressing and she speaks of ‘temporality in the circular and defined movement of a roundabout’. Ragués Pujol is referring to the relationships between movement or physical gestures and sound, as well as their intersections. A system of correlations that the composer has been exploring for some time, including in the rigorous choreography of her silence fantasy #1, a performance in which three newspaper-reading actors move on chairs and yet appear to be static.
Gemma Ragués, silence fantasy #1, UA 2020
She also explores the possible links between electronic and acoustic sounds, arriving to almost contradictory results: In nit de sal for voice, ensemble and electronics from 2019, she poignantly sets poems by Joana Raspall and Maria Mercè Marçal into music, sometimes using excessive sound formations.
Gemma Ragués, nit de sal, UA 2019
The Biel Solothurn Symphony Orchestra concert will see the three world premieres completed by Ulrich Hofer’s Minute Pendulum, a jazzy improvisation system that he adapted for orchestra, thus – building on the ‘creation tools of jazz’ , as he writes himself and shaping it into a composition.
Christian Fluri
The three concerts can be listened to on the streaming platform neo.mx3 on the composers’ profiles.
The concert in full length will be broadcasted in: Neue Musik im Konzert on SRF 2 Kultur on wednesday, 26.5. at 9pm.
Concert-details: Musikforum Biel/Bienne, 9. Sinfoniekonzert
Broadcasts SRF 2 Kultur:
MusikMagazin, saturday/sunday 22./23.5.21: Michal Muggli talks with Florian Hauser
Neue Musik im Konzert, wednesday 26.5.21, 9pm
neo-profiles:
Sinfonie Orchester Biel Solothurn, Michal Rebekka Muggli, Gemma Ragués, Aregnaz Martirosyan, Dieter Ammann, Beat Furrer, Christian Henking, Xavier Dayer, Simon Steen-Andersen, Ensemble Proton Bern, Ulrich Hofer