Andy Moor and Anne-James Chaton continue their conversation with a set of digital singles centered on the traditional metiers. The Handmade series is an homage to craftsmanship through an exploration of the lexicons specific to bakery and pastry making (volume 01), jewellery (volume02) that will unfold over the course of 4 thematic volumes. With guest Yannis Kyriakides on electronics they create works where abstract notions mix with tangible ones by linking the arts of the hand with sound and poetry.

In volume two, Brillants, Anne-James Chaton takes the precious stones and jeweler's craft to unexpected places, in his best style: equivocal and a little dark, with great literary sophistication. Side A “The Blue Moon” names extraordinary diamonds as if they were superstars projecting deep, colorful hues around them, as on a cinema screen. On Side B, “Mon Chaton,” the poet plays with the curious ambiguities of the jewelers' jargon.

Handmade as a series of 4 digital singles was conceived in the spirit of Transfer, a collection of 7 inch vinyl, and later a full album on CD and DL, based on the theme of transition, that the duo created on Unsounds in 2013.

Anne-James Chaton - texts and voice
Andy Moor - guitar
Yannis Kyriakides - electronics

Tracklist

1. The Blue Moon (4:38)
2. Mon Chaton (6:12)

The Blue Moon (excerpt)

Mon Chaton (excerpt)

Biographies

The duo Anne-James Chaton & Andy Moor was inaugurated around 2005 with the performance of conceptual portraits such as “Le Journaliste” which was later immortalised on the album on Unsounds records. The duo has created a great number of live performances where images text and electronics and guitars combine, with remarkable guests including Thurston Moore, and now Yannis Kyriakides on this new series.

ANNE-JAMES CHATON

Anne-James Chaton (Besançon, France, 1970) has developed a multipolar body of work, based on a continuous study of textual materials that punctuate the daily life in contemporary societies. This “poor” literature, created day to day by a multitude of machines - receipts, museum entrance tickets, flyers, business cards, credit cards, subscription cards, etc. - constitutes the material of his textual, sound and visual work. The plural and polyglot dimension of his work has led him to develop projects with artists from other scenes and in other languages. He has created songs with Phia Ménard, Sylvain Prunenec, Valeria Giuga, and has written numerous albums with guitarist Andy Moor (The Ex), German musician Carsten Nicolaï aka Alva Noto and Sonic Youth member Thurston Moore.

His books are published by P.O.L, his visual works shown by the Far West gallery and his sound compositions appear on the labels Noton and Unsounds records. Anne-James Chaton was a resident of the Villa Medici, Academy of France in Rome in 2020. He received the Bernard Heidsieck–Centre Pompidou International Prize for Literature in 2022.

ANDY MOOR

Andy Moor began his musical career in Edinburgh, Scotland playing guitar with the Dog Faced Hermans. He moved to the Netherlands to join the internationally acclaimed agit-prop post-punk group The Ex with whom he has remained a member for over thirty years. More recently Andy has collaborated with Cypriot composer, Yannis Kyriakides; French sound poet, Anne James Chaton and Lebanese saxophonist, Christine Abdelnour and has also worked composing soundtracks with Iranian filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi. His latest projects include a quartet called Lean Left and The Heretics project with Anne James Chaton and Thurston Moore. The end of 2021 also saw Andy begin work as a live DJ and radio producer leading to work with Amsterdam based Echobox Radio with whom he broadcasts a monthly live show entitled Blueprints For A Blackout. The shows are archived on Mixcloud.

YANNIS KYRIAKIDES

Yannis Kyriakides was born in Cyprus and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematise the act of listening and is often drawn to the relation between perception, emotion, language and how they define our experience of sound. In the last years his work has explored this concept through the use of systems of encoding information into sound, synthesising voices and projecting text to music. Yannis has written over a hundred compositions, comprising mostly theatre, multimedia and electroacoustic works for chamber groups and large ensembles. Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded the CD label for new electronic music Unsounds. He is a founding member of the ensemble MAZE, and teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague.

Credits

Production :  Unsounds records
Design: Isabelle Vigier