OM GOSSIP #18

The story of Laure & Laurent

I guess it was the winter of 20/21 when I got familiar with Laure Boer. I instantly connected with her musical approach, because it kind of featured everything that clicks with me - unsynched loops, natural drones, all kinds of strange or selfbuilt instruments, repetition, movement building and a very open, inclusive approach to non-european music. So I contacted her and we did an interview for this newsletter which you still can read here. Out of that developed an ongoing conversation over the following months and in its course, Laure sent me this picture one afternoon:

It was a tape reel by her father, french conductor Laurent Boer, which she found by chance. As the title scribbled on the reel suggests, it was filled with an electroacoustic composition by her father, who took part in a workshop at GRM Paris - the famous Groupe de recherches musicales, founded by Pierre Schaefer in the late 1950s. On the recording, Laurent experiments with tape splicing, loop techniques, and recordings of his own arsenal of instruments from different parts of the world, like a vietnamese mouth organ, different gongs, or a plastic ruler. It’s classic, yet weird and very rough electroacoustic music and I fell in love with these recordings instantly; soon Laure and me agreed this would be a perfect match as the final part of OM’s Echonomy Split Series, where we take rare or unreleased source material of artists as diverse as Yann Gourdon, Schweben, or Julius Gabriel and recontextualise it, be it with other artists, new arrangements or, as in this case, answers to the source material. So 40 years later, in the fall of 2021, Laure sat down and recorded a reply to the recordings of her father, taking some of the same instruments (which later hung in the family living room) or the singing lines of her father as a starting point.

The result is a noisy, yet intimate piece that fits perfectly to Laurent’s recordings, but where Laurent's piece is a through-composed cut and paste work, Laure relies on the energy of a live improvisation.

The tape will be released on 16th of September in an edition of 70 hand-dubbed tapes with riso-printed covers and features an extensive interview between Laure and Laurent. Mastered for tape and digital by one of our favourite frequency benders, Felix Florian Tödtloff, who not only also participated in the Echonomy Series (with Schweben), but whom you also can catch live in Berlin twice in the coming weeks at Arkadoa and Neurotitan. And, speaking of playing live, Laure will do a release show for the tape on 15th of September in Nuremberg:

End transmission 18,

Ambassador Kaputt