Albi Days a été réalisé dans le cadre des rencontres Musique, Quotidien, Sonore au printemps 2005 grâce à une commande d’État du GMEA - Centre de Création Musicale d’Albi-Tarn. Les musiciens et Laurent Sassi ont mis à profit les potentiels acoustiques des différents lieux à leur disposition et varié les situations sonores en jouant sur la nature et les emplacements des micros. A partir des enregistrements, chacun des participants a ensuite élaboré ses propres pièces.
Remerciements à Thierry Besche et toute son équipe.

Every acoustic musician is at the mercy of the sound of the room they play in. Whilst there may be awkward mismatches for composed music, improvisers can, if they wish, radically shape their music to the acoustics in which they find themselves.
In Albi we explored this interplay a little further. Laurent Sassi recorded the trio in the large hall of L'Athanor cultural centre, in the extremely resonant antechamber of the Chapelle, in the Chapelle itself and in the dry studio of GMEA. Some situations used multiple instrument microphones, others room mics. We played inside the Chapelle, with the microphones outside the room; in the studio, where two mics per instrument could create parallel trios; in L'Athanor, with Laurent manipulating a live mix from distant microphones placed all around the room.
The four of us then made pieces, edited from the many hours of music. Music concrete, composition maybe, that still, most of the time, to me anyway, sounds like musicians improvising together.
John Butcher

En marge du festival meusien Densités (où l’on retrouvera Xavier Charles et Axel Dörner dans d’autres contextes), saluons la sortie d’un CD remarquable à plus d’un titre. A la différence de leur premier opus pour Potlatch enregistré en concert en 2000, le trio The Contest of Pleasures a décidé de s’adjoindre les services d’un ingénieur du son « créatif », Laurent Sassi, pour l’enregistrer abondamment dans différents espaces (de la matité d’un studio à la réverbération d’une chapelle) avec différents micros placés dans des endroits stratégiques, profitant ainsi de l’ « âme » et de l’environnement acoustique des lieux, avec l’idée de retravailler les bandes après coup. D’où une surprenante sensation, pour l’auditeur, de successives « mises au point » sonores à effectuer, où l’oreille se perd au fil de leurs superbes déambulations — entre drones, souffles, bruits de clés et autres scories — , basculant d’improvisations acoustiques « pures » à des impressions de compositions et collages de musique concrète, voire électronique.
Gérard Rouy l Jazz Magazine l Octobre 2006

Le succès du premier volet de cette aventure sonore commencée par John Butcher (ss, ts), Xavier Charles (cl) et Axel Dörner (tp) dans l’espace de la chapelle Saint-Jean à Mulhouse en 2000 (The Contest of Pleasures, Potlatch P201) connaît, avec ce nouvel enregistrement, un véritable prolongement et, davantage qu’une simple suite, une avancée qui dépasse les espérances en jouant profitablement du support phonographique comme d’une aire de création – traité pour ce qu’il est, l’enregistrement y est matière lui-même.
Alors que le disque inaugural avait été capté live et d’un trait, cet album est le résultat d’une résidence du trio à Albi (GMEA) durant le printemps 2005 : Laurent Sassi, que l’on connaît bien pour ses subtiles saisies sonores, y a enregistré de façon active les improvisations du trio dans divers contextes et avec plusieurs dispositifs (les micros pouvant être placés tant à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur de différents édifices – d’un studio à une chapelle) avant que les bandes ne soient retravaillées par les musiciens et l’ingénieux ingénieur lui-même.
A chacun d’eux quatre revient donc une élaboration des matériaux a posteriori, par divers procédés de mixage et de montage, qui débouche sur des travaux et de structures et de textures, sans oblitération des qualités individuelles (sur lesquelles il n’est peut-être pas nécessaire de revenir dans ces colonnes) de ces trois souffleurs façonneurs de vibrations – si, en 2000, le sucré [pamplemousse, quetsche, framboise, reine-claude] avait été retenu pour les titres des morceaux, cette fois, c’est le salé qui prime [oignons, cornichons, cresson, chou-fleur]…
Bien que le travail de reconstruction créative ait été mené individuellement, il faut noter que les pièces délivrées s’écoutent aisément dans leur succession (l’exception la plus notable à ce principe étant le seuil du morceau de clôture, monté par Sassi, et ses boucles, bientôt effacées pour une belle déambulation acoustique, attentive à l’espace ; une porte s’y ouvre, on traverse plusieurs mondes vibratoires). La pièce composée par Charles offre de magnifiques contrastes : profondeur des champs juxtaposés dans lesquels l’oreille se perd à force de mises au point (du dedans organique des instruments voire des bouches, au dehors dispersant l’écho) et micro-variations efflorescentes des timbres. Les deux morceaux revenant à Butcher jouent d’effets de fine densité, de stéréophonie et de masses (on connaît ses expériences antérieures, en studio, de soliste démultiplié), du cliquetant au mille-feuille harmonique, tout près de l’improvisé ; avec Dörner, comme chez le clarinettiste, on revient à une mise en scène de durées, de séquences ciselées, à découvrir au fur et à mesure qu’elles se déploient. Un disque d’aujourd’hui et une réussite.
Guillaume Tarche l Improjazz l Juillet 2006

Deuxième opus du trio constitué par Axel Dörner, John Butcher et Xavier Charles. Cette formation illumine depuis quelques années les scènes de la musique acoustique improvisée. Profitant d’un accueil en résidence à Albi, ville tranquille où les briques roses défient le temps, ils travaillent avec le preneur de son Laurent Sassi exploitant les lieux utilisés par l’excellent festival « Musique et quotidien sonore » produit par le GMEA (Groupe de musique électroacoustique d’Albi, dans le Tarn, comme chacun devrait le savoir).
Les musiciens ont ainsi mis à profit le temps accordé, utilisant différents modes d’enregistrements. La musique est alors dépendante de l’environnement acoustique, de l’ambiance du lieu ; elle est liée au placement des microphones (à leur nombre et enfin au mixage des diverses sources ainsi constituées), à leur position relative aux instruments. D’une musique improvisée "naturelle", nous passons soudain au détour d’un index à une matière "concrète". Notre rapport affectif à l’instrument et au musicien bascule. Le son quitte une abstraction formelle et structurante pour une étrange proposition industrielle, liquide et métallique. John Butcher dit que pour lui, ce travail sonne comme celui de quatre musiciens improvisant ensemble. Pour l’auditeur (celui qui ne participa pas au travail d’enregistrement, de sélection, de mixage et de montage) ce disque transporte une bonne composition musicale. Pour être à la fois précis et vulgaire, il s’agit de très bonne musique contemporaine, s’inscrivant dans une tradition du meilleur goût (à vous d’imaginer les parentés à l’écoute du disque). Ce qui manque dans l’actualité discographique dite expérimentale. Merci à Potlatch d’étendre le champ de son intervention.
Dino l Revue & Corrigée l Juin 2006

Just as members of the European Union are gradually adopting shared principals, so the members of Contest of Pleasures (COP) – from different countries – subordinate individual techniques to a group style. Comfortable utilizing the acoustics of a space, multiple mics and post-performance editing to shape and blend their reductionist improvisations, the three have produce a memorable aural soundscape here.
A step forward from COP’s first CD in 2000, Albi Days illuminates how French clarinetist Xavier Charles, German trumpeter Axel Dörner and tenor and British soprano saxophonist John Butcher use wave form modulations and extended techniques as a matter of course. Encompassing pressured staccato timbres plus elongated rumbles and slurs, the five layered, all-acoustic improvisations take on quasi-electronic timbres, especially when hissing flutters and video-game-like fusillade is heard. Very occasionally the three unite for triple counterpoint, three part harmony or startlingly – in Dörner’s or Butcher’s case – let loose with identifiable brassy grace notes or reedy tongue slaps.
Most of the time on these five vegetable-titled tracks however, the instruments are exfoliated sound sources manipulated so that pitches could come from anywhere – or nowhere. Blocked valve techniques and pure air forced through the lead pipe characterize the trumpeter’s contribution along with steady mouthpiece oscillation. As for the reedists, watery whistles, key percussion and snorted vibrato, plus out-and-out overblowing are just the beginning of their techniques.
Invariably not only is the note sounded, but so are its ancillary metallic reverberations. Creating their own versions of sequenced feedback with tremolo slurs, the trio also exposes digging-animal scratches, floor-to-ceiling echoing buzzes and the sound of a tennis ball being battered back-and-forth and stretched rubber hitting a solid surface.
Most dramatic are the passages that conclude Winter Squash where focused reed growls and blocked valve output build to shattering crescendo then shrivel into nearly inaudible heard tongue slaps and bell squeaks. Careful listening to the CD’s gradually unrolling textures repeatedly reveals further unique sequences.
Ken Waxman l Jazzword l November 2006

John Butcher, Axel Dörner and Xavier Charles may have named their trio after their first album Contest of Pleasures, but they play a different game on Albi Days. While their first record presented an entire concert that was defined by the extraordinarily resonant acoustics of Mulhouse’s Chapelle Saint-Jean, this album is constructed from improvisations made in various environments that the musicians and recording engineer Laurent Sassi used as raw material for compositions.
The musicians still improvise with a fine sense for non-obvious, highly affecting compatibility, and they still play like themselves, of course, which means that they play past the edges of their instruments’ known capabilities. If anything, they push farther into the zone of unknown texture; neither melodies nor pulses make themselves felt much, but on Butcher’s Garden Cress for example, spittle pops and abraded whistles are the order of the day. Only Sassi’s Les Cornichons with its looped trumpet introduction, foregrounds its constructed character; the other pieces reveal their post-hoc construction more in the way they juxtapose sounds registered in very different acoustic environments.
Bill Meyer l Signal To Noise l September 2006

For Albi Days, their second Potlatch recording, The Contest of Pleasures (now the trio’s name, formerly an album title; you may recall a similar thing happened with “Foxes Fox”) adopted a very different methodology to the first, reflecting some of the shifts that have taken place in improv in the five years between the releases.
Whereas the first album was recorded live and released as a faithful record of the live event, as was the norm in improv since its infancy, Albi Days is the result of many hours of recording—using no electronics—in a variety of contexts around Albi, that were then subjected to varying degrees of post-production by the musicians and sound engineer Laurent Sassi (something that would have been considered anathema in improv circles a decade ago—but would barely have raised an eyebrow elsewhere). Butcher is responsible for two tracks (titled in English), the others one each. So the results are as much compositions as they are improvisations. But enough of the methodology; what of the results?
Of the six tracks, the two by Butcher show least evidence of manipulation, making them the easiest to start with. Butcher says that he wanted them to sound “played,” and that is what he achieved. Garden Cress begins at low volume, with Butcher employing some of his trademark techniques—fingering with blowing, and blowing without making the reed vibrate—resulting in a textured sound environment that would not sound alien in a rainforest (true of several passages throughout the album). Halfway through the piece, the mood shifts dramatically as Butcher starts to generate ever-louder, high frequency sustained notes, accompanied by a drone effect from Dörner. Winter Squash features multiple layers (manipulated?) of sustained notes that create a consistent but ever-varying drone to mesmerising effect. More than any other saxophonist, Butcher has come to terms with the role of the instrument in the post-eai landscape, having been crucial in shaping that role.
The opener, Xavier Charles’ Les Oignons, and Dörner’s Karfiol are both more constructed than Butcher’s tracks. However, they are both primarily improvised music rather than something else. Both have droning periods interspersed with periods of extremely low volume; neither has much in the way of all out blowing; both fit the rainforest scenario well. Oh, and both are excellent: I’ve listened to them countless times and feel I’ve barely scratched the surface.
The final piece, Sassi’s Les Cornichons, at times resembles an electronic composition rather than improv, although the source material is frequently evident. Its mood is again compatible with that of the rest of the album—in fact, the whole album has a pleasing coherence. This is a rich, complex album that, like the trio’s first, will amply repay years of listening. Please, let’s not wait another five years for volume three…
John Eyles l Allaboutjazz l August 2006


After the initial listen, it seems relatively amazing that this session was recorded without the use of electronics. With strategic mic placement, these cutting-edge European improvisers emit alien sound-sculpting vistas during four tracks recorded at a French cultural center. Complete with eerie drones, and the hornists’ cunning employment of mulit-phonics based techniques, the acoustic variant often equates to android-like environs.
Trumpeter Axel Dorner, clarinetist Xavier Charles and saxophonist John Butcher engage in long-range extended notes via cohesive manipulations and oscillating frameworks. In essence, this musical portraiture is a polytonal fantasy, where the artists explore cavernous regions of space. They engage in slithery trickles of sound with echoing effects, often translating into psycho-laden dreamscapes. On the piece titled Les Cornichons, the trio merges lower register notes with throaty resonance and animalistic noises. Topped with spacey movements and strange outbursts, the music is beyond classification. At times, shadowy in content and irrefutably intriguing from a multitude of standpoints, this improvisational extravaganza intimates much more than what many of us would anticipate.
Glenn Astarita l eJazzNews l August 2006

The Contest of Pleasures consists of John Butcher on tenor and soprano saxophones, Xavier Charles on clarinet, and Axel Dörner on trumpet. They’ve taken their name from the title of their first album, a startlingly beautiful performance in a French country church as part of the 2000 Mulhouse festival. Five years on, this new set maintains the group’s overall sound but reflects a new focus on process and production. Following a week’s recording in Albi, France – where the trio was recorded in a number of different acoustic settings – the musicians selected bits from the entire session and rearranged them, editing them until they could reasonably be considered compositions (which Butcher likens to musique concrète). This yields a music that can glow with an almost serene beauty while also making the most abrupt and often jarring transitions.
Though not recorded with the natural reverb of a cathedral, the group still has a huge sound. Whereas the first album blended the sonorities of, say, wind ensemble Alder Brook via Giacinto Scelsi crossed with eai (electro-acoustic improvisation), this follow-up drifts far more towards the latter idiom. All three of these players seem to have made significant strides on their instruments in the intervening years. Dörner seems to be more intent than ever, not simply on subterranean splatter noises but on swirls of air, distant sirens, banshee songs, and a general etherealism that suits this group quite well. Butcher is one of those rare musicians who continues to develop his sound in fascinating ways (just consult his extraordinary Invisible Ear or Cavern with Nightlife), and Charles’ sensibility for this kind of sound is captured in his miniature La Neige Attend la Neige.
Most pieces highlight the group’s blending of crossing tones and long laminal excursions with intense passages where breath and gurgles imitate mixing boards and cassette mangling. The opening of Garden Cress is remarkable in this light, with reed sounds like dying wheezes egged on by Dörner's low rustle. Somehow this stuff sounds more like Günter Müller or eriKm than two horns (this same effect presents itself on the Müller-esque pulse of the closing Les cornichons). And there are parts of Karfiol which focus on abrupt transitions and huge moving blocks of noise in a nearly Joe Colley-like fashion. Yet there are also more conventional pleasures. Sometimes when Charles is really working the upper partials of a note, for example, Butcher gets quite grainy and Dörner plays with clarion purity, resulting in a magnificent drone (as on Winter Squash) – but just as often, the group are likely to let the bottom fall out immediately into a blip and glitch sequence.
It’s easy to be impressed by the sheer technical range audible from minute to minute – a sonic bestiary, a catalogue of every click, cluck, murmur, and coo you could imagine. But the real delight is the rich, sumptuous, fully realized group sound, manifested not just in the sonic union but in the purpose of these pieces. A highlight of the year so far.
Jason Bivins l Dusted Magazine l June 2006

For their second outing on Potlatch, John Butcher (saxophones), Xavier Charles (clarinet) and Axel Dörner (trumpet) have adopted the title of their first release on the label, 2001's The Contest Of Pleasures, as the name of the group, and the track titles once again are designed to whet the appetite, especially if you're a vegetarian: Les Oignons, Garden Cress, Winter Squash, Karfiol (cauliflower) and Les Cornichons (gherkins).
There the similarities end; for where the earlier album was recorded live in the twelfth century Chapelle Saint Jean in Mulhouse, as part of the 2000's Jazz à Mulhouse Festival, this sequel was recorded over several days in various venues in and around the southern French city of Albi, including another chapel, a large concert hall and a bone dry recording studio. Copies of the recording were dispatched to the three musicians and recording engineer Laurent Sassi to be reconfigured into five tracks (they used to call 'em "remixes"), one credited to each man except Butcher who ended up with two (check out the languages of the track titles and match against the nationalities of the performers and you'll soon figure out which ones were his). The resulting album doesn't exactly mark a new departure either for recordings of improvised music or for the Potlatch label (2001's rouge gris bruit already featured quite a bit of post-prod / composition courtesy Lionel Marchetti), but it's one of the most blatant and striking examples of recent times. Improv purists who like their shit uncut, unedited and unadorned can always go back to The Contest Of Pleasures if they're not satisfied: Albi Days presents a different set of challenges. There are a few discreet overdubs, but most of the reconfigurations are of the order of sequencing, intercutting passages culled from the different sessions according to time-honoured compositional criteria ("for my pieces, I only edited parts together, linearly. In Garden Cress from a single acoustic situation, and in Winter Squash from two acoustic situations, choosing by the pitch relationships between them. There was no overlaying or processing. I wanted them to sound 'played,'" says Butcher), the exception being Sassi's Les Cornichons, which takes the post-prod to another level by looping and layering the material into something more self-consciously artificial. I'm not entirely convinced it comes off as well as the other tracks on the disc, but the playing of the musicians and the quality of the recording and the mixing is so outstanding it manages to work its charms, and will have you coming back for more. Bon appétit.
Dan Warburton l ParisTransatlantic l June 2006

One of the fringe benefits of Reductionnism in its various guises – New London Silence, onkyo – is that players and listeners alike have become sensitised to the range of the potential of small, often discrete sounds, and been made more aware of how they function in a range of musical contexts and environments. The trio of John Butcher (tenor and soprano saxophones), Xavier Charles (clarinet) and Axel Dörner (trumpet), The Contest Of Pleasures’ music is far too active to be construed as Reductionnist, but their non-interrogative interaction and use of space mark them out as fellow travellers.
The group’s first album, also on Potlatch, provided one of the Improv highlights of 2001. Except in terms of quality, Albi Days avoids repeating the formula. In spring 2005 the trio spent a week at GMEA Studios in Albi, south west France, recording in a number of different locations : a large hall in a cultural centre, a chapel, its antechamber and the studio itself. The creative placement of microphones and live mixing (both by Laurent Sassi) present the group in a shifting array of spatial and musical relationships. The musicians and Sassi then edited and remixed a track or two apiece. Some of their reconfigurations are fairly major and veer occasionally in the realms of musique concrète. In its textures, episodic nature and moments of stillness and poise. Les Oignons is at times reminiscent of Morton Feldman’s 1976 composition Routine Investigations. It may have been rendered more compositional by Charles’s mixing and editing, something that’s equally true of the other tracks, but there’s never any doubt that fundamentally this is an improvised music, and a superior one at that.
Brian Marley l The Wire l June 2006

In 2001, the French label Potlatch released The Contest of Pleasures by John Butcher, Xavier Charles and Axel Dörner. The album had a strong impact in avant-garde circles and became a favorite among fans of the then-emerging extremely quiet form of free improvisation. Albi Days (now billed to The Contest of Pleasures) is the belated follow-up -- and it was worth the wait. The fascination exerted by this trio's music resides in the fact that they can make acoustic instruments sound so... non-acoustic. All three musicians use close-miking, toneless breathing and key-clicking techniques to produce the most alien textures, ones that are more readily associated with digital treatments than any acoustic source.
On Albi Days, the trio puts a twist on this aural illusion by composing new pieces from recorded live performances. Working with sound engineer Laurent Sassi, Butcher, Charles and Dörner recorded in various venues and spaces with various acoustic properties, using various recording techniques. From these hours of recordings, each participant (Sassi included) assembled his own piece. The result is more schizophrenic than the first album, especially in Les Oignons (Charles) and Karfiol (Dörner), two tracks with a strong collage feel. Butcher's two contributions focus more on acoustic illusions, combining dry sax notes with echo-drenched trumpet, building a Frankenstein-esque acoustic ambience in the process. Sassi's Les Cornichons concludes the CD with a mesmerizing chorus of churchy long drones and bubbly textures. To their strong improvising instincts, the three musicians here add an uncanny, destabilizing sense of composition that draws the listener into a hall of mirrors worth loosing yourself into. Highly recommended to fans of either of these fascinating artists.
François Couture l All Music Guide l May2006

For this recording, John Butcher, Xavier Charles and Axel Dörner (I believe the group name, if it wasn’t such for their first disc, is now “The Contest of Pleasures”) recorded numerous hours of improvisation in and around Albi-Tarn, a town nestled in the Pyrénées, in various environments from chapels to music studios. The results were then processed by the musicians, one track each by Dörner and Charles, two by Butcher and, for good measure, another by sound engineer Laurent Sassi. Butcher, in his liners, states that for him the outcomes generally still sound like group improvisation and I think that’s by and large true although, if one tilts one’s ears in a certain manner, the pieces can almost as easily be heard as collages.
In any case, the music reads very well. It’s far louder and more strident than the previous disc, the horns rarely shying away from entering banshee territory; angry banshees at that.
Charles’ Les Oignons (the works once again deriving their titles from the gustatory world) begins with a surprisingly “normal” muted trumpet tone which morphs into an array of brass sounds very reminiscent of the general sound of Xenakis’ Pithoprakta. I realize I referenced the late composer in another recent review and maybe it’s a connective phase I’m going through à la Eno of a couple years back, but much of this piece, and a fine one it is, carried Xenakis-like echoes for me. It’s chock full of fascinating sounds and sonic contrasts, laid out more episodically than depth-wise, but compelling throughout including a brief suspension of musician activities near the end when you can pick-up automotive sounds outside the performing space.
The first of the two Butcher concoctions, Garden Cress, initially travels through lower volume breaths and sputters but soon catapults up into an ear-rending cascade of wind-driven shrieks, subsiding ultimately into a bed of key-clicks and glottal pops. Maybe more than any other track, this is the one that, had I been informed it was a pure, real-time improvisation, I wouldn’t have batted a lash. His next, Winter Squash, has some deliciously layered dronage, overtones abounding, veering more often into harsher sound areas than sonant ones; again, I hear tinges of Xenakis wind ensembles. Here, as elsewhere, it took this listener several exposures before the music began to sink in and really cohere. It helped, I found, to listen on headphones to more fully appreciate the spatial separation, presumably an element of the post-production processing, although the notes also refer to elaborate placement of microphones so, who knows?
Dörner’s Karfiol (I looked it up—cauliflower) kind of picks up where Winter Squash left off, though upping the harshness factor and reverting to the episodic character of Charles’ piece. This is the one track that I couldn’t quite get a handle on, that never amounted to more than the sum of its parts for me.
Sassi’s contribution, Les cornichons, is something of a wild card, the most overtly electronic of the bunch, utilizing clear samples and phased repetitions at the start. He constructs a real nice, forceful track, choosing an intriguing sound palette, varying the amplitude in interesting ways (including forays into extreme overtones) and, generally, creating a complex, difficult-to-dissect composition, probably my favorite piece on the disc, a mild surprise considering the caliber of the three principals.
Some good, tough music to munch on here, perhaps more acidic and chewy than you might expect.
Brian Olewnick l Bagatellen l April 2006

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