GEAR(S) & GLASS:

MAKING - BREAKING - MAKING - BREAKING.  

GEARS, the second album of artists Jeanne Briand and Romain Azzaro is a unique approach to glass that shatters its tranquility and transforms its fragments into poetic, psychedelic electronic music. Out on vinyl / digital formats, May 24th, 2024 on Paris-Berlin-Venice-based multidisciplinary platform fluxus temporis bridging conversation between sound, spaces & arts. With an upcoming show at MONOM pres. Gear(s) and Glass on 25th May 2024 in Berlin, this project enters another stage of its existence since 2016. In this text I seek to get behind the album GEARS and to understand how the many individual and common streams of thought and ideas between Jeanne and Romain have flowed into this album.

And at the end this isn’t a relay race with a finish line, it’s a joint effort to last. It started with both having a common thought, and after years of working independently in their own disciplines, Jeanne created an idea that she passed on to Romain. Romain took the idea, transformed it, and brought it back to Jeanne, who developed it further. The original idea mutated, broke, and so the process started over again. While Jeanne has her production chain for her disciples, Romain has his too. And it is that two restless thinkers, come together, over and over again, to bring into being, along personal change.

“...We made the first album in 2016 called a “A Gamete Glass Tale” which was part of an exhibiton called “Random Control” by Jeanne. The musical part happened to be released way after the exhibition in 2010. The Glass sculptures became the instruments for the album.”

Random Control, Jeannes “idea to transform test tubes into exo-body organs involved in sexual reproduction.” “... It took us three months to translate my sketches into sculptures. The pairing between the organic and the mechanic became the common thread of my research.” Jeanne explains in a previous interview with Metal Magazine (Peacock 2021).

Wikipedia: “Gametes are an organism’s reproductive cells, also referred to as sex cells.”

Random Control, Jeannes “idea to transform test tubes into exo-body organs involved in sexual reproduction.” “... It took us three months to translate my sketches into sculptures. The pairing between the organic and the mechanic became the common thread of my research.” Jeanne explains in a previous interview with Metal Magazine (Peacock 2021).


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If you break something in half, metaphorically speaking, you find two pieces. If you break glass you find many pieces. How many, is in noones control. From that first starting point and big exhibition, many more pieces evolve over the years. You break a thought apart and enter a crack. Random Control is the crack I fall through, to end up in a whole world, the binary world between music and contemporary art of Jeanne and Romain. 

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      “ROMAIN: There is always beauty and poetry with Jeanne.”


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Discovering with 18 that she and her twin were made in glass tubes, as the first in-vitro baby generation, it did something within Jeanne. I lately saw the movie “Alien” with set design by H.R. Gieger and I asked myself how he has built these amazing worlds. Looking at Jeannes work, I found a port.


JEANNE: I wanted to make this (glass) material, and that's how the journey started. In the very first year, I only worked with glass, which comes from the test tubes used in scientific laboratories. Later I discovered glassmaking with liquids and that started another journey for me. I first had the opportunity to assist a glassblower who worked theoretically with colours and pigments, with things that changed the glass and to which it reacted. Starting from a very specific mental concept, I then opted for more material, more abstract and away from this very precise concept.’

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Along her body of work, you can trace the contours of her thinking, in which she builds her own fantasy world that exists outside the rules of reality and at the same time brings it into a concrete form that is connected to real feelings and her own childhood memories. ‘I just use pre-established codes and distort them,’ Jeanne (Peacock 2021).


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JEANNE: I work with glass blowers with whom I blow the sculptress but I am not a glass blower. I am specialized in sculptures in glass. It started 12 years ago and I spend  many years assisting glass blowers and somehow when I wanted to make this project with sound I asked them to teach me how to blow the sculptures with them, because, I don’t know why, but I wanted the breath to shake the glass, I wanted to make them vibrant and to make sounds.”


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On the album Gamete of Glass Tales you hear her speaking through the glass, a very familiar sounding voice surrounded by Romain's music production.

She inserts the person (voice) into the glass, processes it through the glass and another person (voice) comes out the other side. The same person, but changed. That immediately makes me think of a science fiction story. A person playing God. Romain adds classical music to the whole thing, eerie, abstract and at the same time rhythmic, harmonious. Making you move forward in a story: “It is all about fiction, and how fiction is part of the real. It is all about desire, this is the song about capturing empty spaces…” she speaks through glass.

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ROMAIN: Actually, for the first album, we wanted to hang the glass sculptures in the room, with microphones inside, and when they (the people) speak, they feel like they're in the glass. But we couldn't do it because of the pandemic, at least not physically. And soon I'm presenting this new piece (at Monom), which is much less interactive with the audience. But Jeanne is hopefully coming to Berlin and will bring some glass instruments that we might break at the end of the show, that's really not certain. But at least we'll hang up the instruments.’


ROMAIN: Jeanne and I were together for more than 10 years, we separated when I moved to Berlin … We were always dreaming when we were a couple to make an album together and to make instruments. In 2016, we got back together, artistically speaking this time, making the instrument. We started to work by distance.


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Romain, who has worked extensively on audiovisual projects, film music and installations as a guitarist, drummer and classical pianist and was involved in a campaign for Chanel with Karl Lagerfeld in 2017, came to Berlin in 2012 and founded the music label Rouge Mechanique. A platform to present and explore live performances and albums, his own and those of other musicians. ‘During the pandemic, I started writing music again and composed an album called Colors of Now, for which I put together a quartet. We had beautiful dinners at my house and called classical musicians. That was the first album I released under my real name as a contemporary artist and classical musician.’ 


During the pandemic we had access to the Funkhaus, so we recorded between my house and there (Monom) and that was the first album as Romain Aazzaro as a classical and contemporary artist, as a classical musician.

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ROMAIN: “And so (with Jeanne) we presented the new exhibitions called “Gears”. I made the soundtrack of it and afterwards the album that you hear. I think the (upcoming) piece in Monom will be the third album. “


JEANNE: The glass sculptures and the gears that I use, create the sounds that become the music, so that's pretty much what we've been doing. I've been experimenting for many years, even with Romain for two years, and it makes more sense now, but it comes and eventually evolves along the way.


ROMAIN: The first album was very inspired by different musicians, so more musical, and the second album GEARS is more mechanical. I went further with the concept. It's like breaking glass on the floor and the sound lasts forever. You create harmonies and a lot of them. It's really nice when you break glass, not when it hits, but afterwards, it sounds like water. I mean, my experiments make me hear very sweet broken glass that almost heals the soul.




ROMAIN: I told you that the second album is more of a response to the first album, imagine the first album is: ‘an instrument passing through glass’. So we had to reverse the concept and we had a brainstorming session about the second album to reverse these instruments of glass.


I was going around Berlin looking for doors, windows and whatever and then I break it in my studio. For one week I was just breaking glass and I was playing with the pieces and then I send the recording to a friend of mine who mix and master it so I have different sounds, then I use different machines to randomize the sounds or created melodies and with that I go to Cesar. Cesar has like high advanced machines to go even further with the breaking glass and then after all this material what I like the most is to create the beauty inside it.


It happened to be a long process chain. It was passed along. It started with an idea and it converted into an lopping object.


For me that is also why I am creating a new concept for Monom. The piece is going to be called “Gears and Glass” because the initial concept for me musically at least was to break the glass which is the anti-these from the first album which was contstruct the glass.


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JEANNE: They (the sculptures) originally came from drawings, and when I made them they were very figurative at first, at the very beginning they were reproductive organs, and in the process they went into abstraction, just being more round because the bigger shapes would make more interesting sounds, and then I explored with the roundness and then worked on the thickness and made some holes in it to make it come alive and use it as a wind instrument.”

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I have increasingly found myself understanding the aeon of their collaboration. The design that music and art become modular, an arc to the text project, that will keep its strace marks, is something I am very interested in. The glass breaks. I think of shards on the floor. One glass shattered on the floor after the other to create sound. You remove the shards, shatter a new one, but what happens to the glass, does it disappear?


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JEANNE: Yeah they break, they don’t disappear because of all the fragments that are used, so it has the eternal presence and idea.


It (glass) is a tangible, intangible material. From the material (glass) it goes to the object, from the object to the sound and from the sound to an object, the vinyl, the record. So it's a kind of loop, and we are very interested in this. In parallel to glass, I also work a lot with wax, which in a way works the same way. I mean, the light goes through (the wax) it in the same way and it doesn't break either, it melts.


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It is about the fibres of figurative concepts, about the development of a notion over time and about the complexity that the unfolding entails. My thoughts are also developing into further questions at this moment. What kind of listening states does GEAR(S) engender?