LP - 180 Gram Vinyl with Download. Limited copies come with a bonus 5 Track CD Mouvements Organiques of exclusive alternative versions recorded at the Union Chapel. Limited copies with Rough trade Exclusive Bonus CD. Composer and musician Ang?le David-Guillou has reworked for organ a selection of tracks from her mesmerising sophomore album, En Mouvement. Titled Mouvements Organiques, these five pieces recorded in just one morning at Union Chapel, echo the ideas and motifs of its counterpart. Yet, where En Mouvement is rich with the interlocking melodies and shifting rhythms that define its character, Mouvements Organiques pares the music down to its essential qualities. Vraisemblance has been transformed into three sprawling ambient pieces, Mouvements Organiques, parts I, II and III, drawing out its harmonic movement and expanding it almost beyond recognition. En Mouvement and Respiro, meanwhile, retain much of their identity, yet take on new, restored forms in the hands of Ang?le. London-based French composer Ang?le David-Guillou makes audacious music that explores the interaction between rhythm and melody, structure and emotion, permanence and change. Her work is one of incessant dialogue between these elements, creating hypnotic compositions whose mutable internal architecture and shifting melodic accentuations immediately draw the listener in. It’s a compositional process that is central to the eight compelling essays on the aptly titled En Mouvement, David-Guillou’s new album, the second under her given name, but it’s an approach that was present even in her earlier singer-songwriting work as Klima, and with cult electronic art-rock band Piano Magic. Her signature writing style is characterised by asymmetric bar lengths, irregular verse constructions and zoetrope-like arrangements – an approach to music as implicitly indebted to the canon of innovative rock and pop, Philip Glass’s Music With Changing Parts or early European Baroque music. Born and raised in Tours in the Loire Valley, David-Guillou was classically educated in piano, singing, harmony and musical theory. She became obsessed with the work of German composer Carl Orff at a young age, and later enticed by the experimentation of Sonic Youth, taught herself guitar and joined her first rock band at 15. Simultaneously, she developed a longstanding interest in the academic study of the social history of music, and worked on her PhD at the Sorbonne. From 2002 she began collaborating with the aforementioned London-based avant-rock group Piano Magic, singing and playing guitar, synths and other keyboards, co-writing a good deal of the band’s material and touring all over the world. In 2006 she moved to London and recorded her debut solo album, under the Klima moniker. Released the following year on West London’s Peacefrog imprint (home to Jos? Gonz?lez, Little Dragon et al), the album was a critical success. She was soon at work on a second Klima album, ‘Serenades and Serinettes,’ released by Second language in 2010. In 2008 David-Guillou had purchased a second-hand upright piano, her first piano since childhood, and somehow squeezed it into a room at the top of the stairs in her south London flat. Falling instantly in love with the instrument all over again, she began composing on it straight away. The resulting material would ultimately appear on the album Kourouma (named after the Ivorian anti-war author Ahmadou Kourouma), released in 2013 by Village Green. This impressive collection of compositions, notably influenced by the succinct, synergistic dialogue between melodic and rhythmic elements developed in the music of Moondog, was lauded for its maturity and the melodic richness of its dozen essays for piano, electric piano, neo-Baroque chamber orchestration and voice. Eager to explore her metier further and experiment in particular with the resonance of the piano as a compositional tool, in 2015 David-Guillou set out to purchase a grand piano. After many a pianistic encounter across the length and breadth of Britain, she eventually discovered an August F?rster model built in the early 1980s, in what was then East Germany, and immediately knew it was the one. A sublime instrument, with an incredibly sensuous bass and rich harmonics, the piano would provide the foundation for a set of ambitious new compositions, later interleaved with David-Guillou’s intricate arrangements for saxophones, woodwind and strings, that would eventually make up the En Mouvement album. Informed by a rich and eclectic tapestry of cultural stimuli, including Philip Glass’s ‘Glassworks,’ the music for movement of Thomas De Hartmann and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Alvin Curran's compositions for the piano, French and Spanish Baroque music, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Jean Cocteau, Sufi writings, Sumerian art and contemporary dance, the pieces on ‘En Mouvement’ are the work of a reflective, intellectually engaged yet delightfully instinctive modern composer who has made the limitless mutability implied by the concept of ‘movement’ a thing of personal transformation and mesmeric musicality. “Very early on in the process of working on the compositions for this album, the idea of ‘movement’ became my central point of focus”, David-Guillou confirms. “The word seemed to encapsulate all my obsessions. En mouvement literally means ‘in motion’, but the word in French, as in English, is extremely rich and suggests an array of ideas such as motion, gesture, dance, musical parts, clockwork, repetition, displacement, emotional confusion or excitement. I hadn’t previously understood how important this concept was to me.” With her second album of modern composition, Angele David-Guillou’s career is palpably en movement, and, excitingly, it feels like the beginning of a long and thrillingly creative musical journey.
