Erwan Menguy Quartet will unveil their new album “SPI” on its release March 29, 2024, on Klam Records / L’Autre Distribution.
Their first single ‘A 10′ will be available on all platforms on March 8, 2024.
Erwan Menguy, a Breton flute player with an international reputation, has launched his first eponymous music project. As the leader of the quartet, he has chosen to surround himself with string instruments for a resolutely acoustic result inspired by bluegrass bands or chamber music ensembles, based on a repertoire of his own compositions. For this new live act and recording project, he has joined forces with three talented musicians with whom he has been working for many years – Erwan Bérenguer on the guitar, Kevin Le Pennec on the cittern and Hugues Lassere on the double bass – with a desire to bring them together in a more substantial format that allows a novel approach to the musical accompaniment as well as to the writing and arranging processes.
“The quartet’s artistic statement is resolutely acoustic and flirts with American folk music: the wooden flute is the leader, just like a voice surrounded by a trio of harmonic and rhythmic strings. The choice of instruments is deliberate and encourages an acoustic approach, inspired – somehow – by the natural balance of sound textures within string quartets or chamber music ensembles. This artistic choice is based on a fascinating exploration of the notion of ”sound projection”, on the ability to ”place” sounds within an ensemble, and on the adaptation required by the writing of a piece of music. Part of the repertoire breaks away from the usual Western musical patterns, through the play of superimpositions within asymmetrical rhythms, but also through the relationship between the lead theme and the accompaniment. Here, each musician has a very “organic” and energetic relationship with the music and their instrument, undoubtedly linked to the major importance of dance music in their respective careers. The objective therefore is to allow the spectator to hear the smallest details of the musicians’ playing as well as the intrinsic sounds of the instruments, by highlighting all the creaking and scraping noises, and everything that makes the music sound more alive. This helps bring out the arrangement work conceived as early as the composition phase, in which the instrumental parts balance each other acoustically and naturally, the arrangements being sometimes very rhythmic, and each instrument playing a minimalist and persistent sequence of the same puzzle.”
Erwan Menguy
