Laurent Pernice et Dominique Beven - Le Corps Utopique released 2022 label Alma De Nieto catalog number DNN 033C

In 2018, actress and dancer Emma Gustafsson and director Laurent Hatat (Anima Motrix Company), decided to reproduce on stage  by dancing it, a radio lecture by french philosopher Michel Foucault . They commissioned to Laurent Pernice the creation of the soundtrack to support both  text and dance focused on  Michel Foucault's words. Emma Gustafsson is the sole performer on stage. The show, entitled "Le Corps utopique" (”The Utopian Body"), named after the famous conference, was premiered at the end of 2020 at Rlap, in Marseille. 

During the creative process of this music, it became evident that only wind instruments could effectively accompany philosopher's and dancer's breath. So Laurent Pernice contacted Dominique Beven, an experienced multi-instrumentalist (but above all a blower) who collected a large number of instruments from all over the world. This gave him the possibility to develop a very diversified palette of timbres, that allowed the composer to vary the sound colors according to the scenes. The two musicians play Irish flutes, a Laotian khen, an Armenian bass doudouk, a diatonic accordion, a hulisi flute from Yunnan, an Andean moceño, various ocarinas... However, even if these instruments come from very different cultures, the music produced is not at all part of a kind of a world-music-fusion. 

These are truly original pieces, very personal, closer to contemporary and improvised music than to ethnic music.The recordings began in autumn 2019 in Laurent Pernice's studio. Dominique Beven improvised a series of tunes, under the direction of the composer, during three  different sessions distributed over time. The sound recordings were then re-arranged, mixed and electronically manipulated  by Laurent Pernice to produce the final pieces to be submitted to Anima Motrix Company .The album " Le Corps utopique", which is Laurent Pernice's 18th album, was released by ADN Records, a label based in Milan (Italy) and run since 1983 by people who are passionate about new, industrial and or improvised music. Since the beginning, they have shown a strong interest in deviant French music, publishing Pascal Comelade, Pierre Bastien, and DDAA... All the sessions recorded by Laurent Pernice and Dominique Beven have been gathered on this album. Michel Foucault's text does not appear on the CD, it is a purely instrumental album.

              

Laurent Pernice

Since 1988, the date of the release of "Détails", his first album, Laurent Pernice has gradually built up his battlefield, which is not far from extending to the whole planet. A multi-instrumentalist (bass, double bass, keyboards, erhu, percussion), he has produced nearly twenty albums in France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Slovenia and Sweden, not to mention collaborations and compilations (Brasil, Japan, Australia...). In parallel to his personal work, he regularly works with the Artonik company (with which he performs all over the world), the experimental group Palo Alto and the science fiction writer Alain Damasio.

Dominique Beven

Born in Brittany, he studied Celtic music from 1975. He then toured Europe with the bagadou of Lann-Bihoué and Lorient. From 1982 onwards, he moved towards a fusion of traditional and electric instruments. His arrival in Marseilles in 1992, where many communities live together, allowed this self-taught ñack-of-all-trades to make numerous encounters and to diversify his approach to music. Multi-instrumentalist, he plays wind instruments (flutes, oboe, khen, bagpipes...), strings (guitar, dan nguyet, mandolin...) and hand and stick percussion (drum, bodhran, bendir...)