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Frantz Loriot — While Whirling (Thin Wrist)

Photo by Philippe Pierre

While Whirling by Frantz Loriot

There’s something very precise about Frantz Loriot’s solo music. What you hear is all there is to hear, which is one person playing a few sounds you expect and many you do not on a viola. It is not programmatic music; there’s no story about Peter and the Wolf or a war between two nations or the emotional anguish that one person suffers when their partner is taken away to fight that war.

Still, it takes place within a series of contexts, beginning with the way it is presented. The physical manifestation of While Whirling is an exactingly produced vinyl record packaged in a striking sleeve that has both glossy and matte finishes. The sleeve looks like a collage, but it is not. It is a mass produced, unified image that is the product of multiple processes, and if you take the sleeve to be a statement made about the music, then you might start wondering what processes resulted in Loriot playing what he played when he played it.

His biography yields some clues. Born of French and Japanese parents and raised in France, he is by training a third-generation classical musician. But even though he participated in many years of classical learning and practice, he never quite cottoned to the family business, and in his 20s, he broke from it. He began playing improvised music, and after a period of seeking education from improvisers, he based himself for a time in New York. Since then, he has performed with musicians from either side of the Atlantic, including Joachim Badenhorst, Pascal Niggenkemper, Jeremiah Cymerman, Duane Pitre and Christoph Erb. More recently, Loriot received his mail in Zurich, Switzerland, where this LP was recorded.

What Loriot has played with other musicians has often related in some way to classical practice. For examply, Baloni, his trio with Badenhorst and Niggenkemper, sounded like a chamber ensemble, albeit one that drew heavily upon the vocabulary of improvised music. But his solo music’s relationship to the classical tradition is one of refutation. The lot of most classical musicians is not that different from that of highly skilled factory workers; they learn to do what others tell them to do, and their work depends upon their ability to satisfactorily make something that has been determined by designers and institutional decision-makers. In an interview on the Thin Wrist website, Loriot describes his alienation from the music, its social-political structures. He chose not to play that game, and every time he plays a sound that would earn opprobrium in that context, he’s refuting it anew.

But that doesn’t mean that While Whirling is just an expression of rebellion. It is a concentration of acts of making, for what is improvised music, but an enactment of making and finishing something for a present or anticipated audience? It is also a modeling of fluid, evolving relationships that deal with questions as well as known quantities. What’s this sound worth? What can this instrument really do? How does one combine conventional and unconventional sounds, and why should anyone care? The constants in Loriot’s music are his use of the viola, and the tension he generates with it. Whether it’s a brute rasp, a barely-there whisper, or an isolated pluck and its consequent reverberations, he makes sounds that demand to be heard. This music isn’t about remembering events past, or soothing some part of your mind while you do your daily tasks; it’s about making the most of a moment, delivering a charge to a space you entered and a moment that began when you sat in your seat or put the tone arm on the record, one that will end when you walk out of the room, or when the needle either picks up or doesn’t (one side ends in a locked groove). It’s about Loriot’s presence in a present, which in turns influences your present. It’s real, right now. Consider it a gift.

Bill Meyer

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