There is a certain perversity in calling a three-CD set by twenty-five improvisers "25 pièces sans vide". The title suggests an absence of emptiness, while free improvisation traditionally thrives on precisely the spaces where nothing appears to be happening. And then there is Le UN itself: twenty-five people calling themselves “the one”, which sounds either like a philosophical proposition or the name of a particularly badly organised superhero. In reality, the contradiction is the point. "25 pièces sans vide" is an extended examination of how a crowd can remain a crowd without becoming a blur, and how individual freedom might survive when twenty-five nervous systems are making decisions at the same time.

Le UN began in 2012 through the initiative of double bassist David Chiesa, initially bringing together musicians with very different backgrounds and experimenting with graphic, oral and textual forms of direction. In 2019, the ensemble changed course, concentrating exclusively on free or non-idiomatic improvisation and abandoning scores and formal direction altogether. Its members are involved not only in making the music but also in the organisation of the group, which operates horizontally rather than according to a conventional leader-and-orchestra structure.

That distinction is crucial. Le UN is not simply a large free-improvisation orchestra. It is an attempt to make the organisation of the ensemble itself part of the artistic experiment. The group explicitly treats improvisation as an attitude rather than a genre, and its interest in impermanence extends beyond the music: performances leave traces, recordings, memories and consequences, but cannot reproduce the original situation.

The box gathers five substantial pieces recorded between 2021 and 2022, divided between large-ensemble performances, smaller formations and an outdoor intervention. Across roughly three hours, the scale keeps changing: 45 minutes in Gradignan, nearly an hour in Le Havre, then progressively smaller groups at Cluny before the musicians move into the public space of Place Saint-Michel in Bordeaux. It is less a conventional album than a set of different experiments conducted on the same social organism.

The first disc, "Unité nodale T4S", immediately demonstrates the problem Le UN has chosen for itself. Put twenty-five experienced improvisers in the same room and you have an almost absurd quantity of possible decisions. Somebody can become louder. Somebody else can disappear. A saxophone can interrupt a cello; an electronic texture can undermine a percussion pattern; a piano can suddenly provide a centre of gravity that nobody explicitly asked for. The danger is obvious: collective improvisation can become either a polite soup or an arms race. Le UN generally avoids both.

What makes the large ensemble convincing is its ability to create temporary centres rather than a permanent hierarchy. Sophie Agnel's piano can suddenly become structurally important without becoming “the leader”; percussion can gather momentum without turning into a rhythm section; voices, strings and brass can briefly form recognisable relationships before abandoning them. Electronics from Jérôme Noetinger and Lionel Marchetti do not simply provide atmospheric wallpaper, either. They alter the apparent scale of the ensemble, making acoustic gestures seem larger, stranger or more distant.

The musicians are individually too distinctive to disappear completely. That is one of the group's most interesting characteristics. The lineup includes several generations and approaches to experimental music, from piano, strings, double basses and winds to rotating surfaces, electronics, accordion, voice, hurdy-gurdy, light and physical actions. The challenge is not to suppress these personalities but to prevent them from behaving like twenty-five soloists waiting for their turn. Le UN's own description of its practice places individual singularity at the centre while insisting that it must not obstruct shared space. That sounds suspiciously utopian on paper. Fortunately, the music is more complicated than the philosophy.

"Unité nodale ESJ", occupying the whole of the second disc, makes this especially clear. Its length changes the listener's relationship with concentration. There is no convenient three-minute reset button, no chorus to announce that the previous argument has been resolved. Instead, density accumulates and recedes. Electronics can create broad fields of pressure, while strings, percussion and winds introduce irregular disturbances. At times the texture seems almost geological, as if the ensemble were slowly excavating a sound rather than performing one.

This is also where the title becomes useful. There are “pieces without gaps”, but that does not mean there are no silences or reductions in intensity. The absence of a gap is conceptual rather than merely acoustic. One event remains connected to the next even when the audible material becomes sparse. Listening becomes an exercise in remembering what has just disappeared.

A recent assessment of the set rightly emphasised the unusual ability of the musicians to retain their individual expertise inside the larger aggregate. It also noted the markedly different character of the discs: the first and final pieces combine acoustic and electronic impulses, while the second is more heavily oriented toward electronic waveforms and the two middle pieces on CD3 are predominantly acoustic. The observation is useful because it reveals that "25 pièces sans vide" is not really about one Le UN sound. There isn't one.

The third disc is where the proposition becomes more intimate. "PME postes fixes" reduces the ensemble to a smaller constellation involving piano, rotating surfaces, percussion and electronics. The reduction does not make the music simpler. It makes the relationships more exposed. Every sound has more responsibility because there are fewer bodies available to disguise it. A small metallic gesture can suddenly acquire structural significance; an electronic oscillation can become almost architectural; piano fragments can hover between melody and percussive interruption.

It is here that Le UN's approach begins to resemble chamber music without adopting chamber music's usual manners. The players listen closely, but there is no obligation to be elegant about it. Sounds can scrape, interrupt, hover, stutter or simply refuse to develop. The intimacy is therefore not cosy. It is closer to being in a room with several people who are all paying extremely close attention to one another and none of whom has been given the authority to settle the argument.

"PME cordes" goes further by reducing the acoustic palette largely to strings, accordion and voice. Three double basses, two cellos and two violins create a fascinating vertical tension between low resonance and high-frequency fragility. The result is almost a study in how little is required for strings to stop sounding “beautiful” in the conventional sense. Bow pressure, friction, scraping, resonance and interruption become as important as pitch.

The voice and accordion introduce another layer of ambiguity. The human voice can suggest language even when no language is being used, while the accordion is capable of sounding simultaneously mechanical and organic. Together they create the impression of an improvised miniature theatre in which nobody has bothered to write the script. This is perhaps the most persuasive argument for Le UN's insistence that improvisation is not a genre. The music does not need to sound like a particular tradition because its subject is the act of negotiating what happens next. Then the musicians leave the stage.

"Brigade d'Intervention Légère PSM", recorded at Place Saint-Michel in Bordeaux, places the ensemble directly inside public space. Here the environment is no longer a neutral acoustic container. Voices, ambient noise and the unpredictable behaviour of the surrounding square become part of the material. The distinction between performer and audience becomes less secure, which is precisely what Le UN has been questioning throughout its practice.

This is more than an interesting recording trick. Playing outdoors introduces a different kind of risk. A concert hall can be controlled, at least in theory. A public square has traffic, conversations, weather, pedestrians, distractions and people who did not consent to becoming an avant-garde audience. The world is allowed to interrupt the musicians. In such circumstances, improvisation stops being a purely musical negotiation and becomes a negotiation with reality itself.

That interest in displacement is fundamental to Le UN's broader activity. The ensemble has explored streets, rivers, caves, exhibition spaces and acousmatic situations, deliberately placing improvisation in environments that disturb the conventional separation between performer, listener and location. The point is not simply to find exotic places in which to record unusual sounds. It is to discover how much of the music depends on the idea of a stage in the first place. The answer, on "25 pièces sans vide", seems to be: less than we might assume.

There is also a subtle political dimension to the ensemble's method, although it wisely avoids turning the recordings into an ideological lecture. Twenty-five people sharing responsibility without a conductor is not a metaphor for harmonious society. Quite the opposite. It exposes how difficult collective life actually is. Someone has to listen. Someone has to leave space. Someone has to accept that their excellent idea is not going to happen. Someone else has to make a noise at precisely the wrong moment and discover that it was, accidentally, the right one. That tension is what keeps the music alive.

The set is not uniformly easy listening, and it should not be. The extended "Unité Nodale ESJ" can become deliberately dense, with electronic textures occupying enough space to test the listener's patience. A recent review of the set found this concentration less convincing than the more varied acoustic sections, noting the tendency of the long second-disc performance toward sustained electronic density. That criticism is fair, but the slight imbalance also makes the box more revealing. A project genuinely committed to collective risk should occasionally produce results that are less immediately persuasive. Otherwise the “risk” is just good branding.

What ultimately distinguishes "25 pièces sans vide" is therefore not technical virtuosity, although there is an extraordinary amount of it. Nor is it simply the spectacle of twenty-five musicians improvising simultaneously. Its real subject is attention: how individual attention can become collective without becoming uniform, and how a group can construct temporary form without deciding in advance what that form should be.

The three-CD format makes that question physical. You do not consume this music like a playlist. You spend time with it. The box comes with a twenty-page bilingual booklet containing texts by Le UN, Joël Pagier, Jean-Philippe Pierron and Nate Wooley, reinforcing the sense that the release is intended not merely as documentation but as an account of an ongoing practice.

And perhaps “documentation” is the wrong word anyway. The ensemble itself insists on the distinction between traces and proof. A recording can tell us that something happened. It cannot give us the situation in which it happened, the glances between musicians, the physical acoustics, the audience's reactions, the accidental noise outside the room or the precise instant when one player decided to enter and another decided not to.

That missing information is not a defect. It is the residue that makes the recordings worth hearing.

"25 pièces sans vide" ultimately presents improvisation as a strange form of collective architecture. Nothing is fixed, yet structures appear. Nobody is officially in charge, yet decisions accumulate. Individual voices remain audible, yet something larger occasionally emerges from their interference. And the “one” in Le UN never becomes a single voice. It becomes a temporary agreement between many.

Twenty-five people making one music without making themselves one person: humanity has spent millennia failing to solve that problem politically. Le UN at least gets a few hours of excellent noise out of it.

There is a small contradiction hiding inside the title "Volatile Poem". A poem usually implies something deliberately shaped, while volatility suggests a form that cannot quite be trusted to remain where it was put. I’A’V understand the contradiction perfectly. Their debut is built from songs, but the songs keep shedding their skins; it contains voices, cello and flute, but none of these instruments is allowed to remain entirely itself. The result is music that seems to hover between composition and dissolution, as if someone had written a song on a piece of ice and then become curious about what happens next.

I’A’V emerged from an invitation made by gnration in Braga to Inês Malheiro, who brought together Arianna Casellas and Violeta Azevedo for a residency that first produced "Volatile Poem". The three musicians arrived with considerably different backgrounds. Malheiro has developed a practice in which the voice is treated as raw material as much as a means of communication, moving between composition, improvisation, performance and sound work. Casellas works across music and interdisciplinary practice, with cello and an interest in the folklore and cultural residues of the places she has inhabited. Azevedo moves between composition and improvisation, particularly through the dialogue between transverse flute and electronics. Their meeting therefore does not feel like the assembly of three musicians looking for a common genre. It feels more like three established vocabularies being forced to negotiate a new grammar.

That negotiation is immediately apparent in “Echoes”. The voice appears neither as conventional singing nor as pure abstraction. It remains recognisably human, but its surroundings make its identity unstable. Electronic tones flicker around it, while the instrumental elements seem to occupy an uncertain distance. The piece establishes one of the album’s most effective tricks: whenever the music approaches something resembling a song, it slightly alters the conditions under which the song can exist.

“Air Particles” expands that idea. The title could almost be mistaken for a piece of New Age packaging, but the music is considerably less polite. Flute and cello provide organic contours while electronics introduce brittle edges, suspended tones and interruptions. The instruments do not simply accompany one another. They seem to be listening through different physical laws. The flute breathes; the cello pulls sound through the strings; the electronic layer behaves as though breathing were an optional feature.

This makes Violeta Azevedo’s flute particularly important. It does not function merely as the delicate acoustic counterweight to Malheiro’s voice and the cello. Its breathiness becomes a reminder that even the most fragile sound has a body behind it. Casellas’s cello supplies another kind of resistance, its strings bringing friction, grain and gravity into a record otherwise capable of becoming almost weightless. Against them, Malheiro’s voice can move from intimate presence to something fractured, multiplied or electronically transformed. The three materials consequently keep correcting one another.

The nearly ten-minute “Caminha” is where the album’s architecture becomes most apparent. Rather than behaving like an extended song in the conventional sense, it unfolds through changes of density and perception. There are moments when the music seems remarkably exposed, followed by passages in which processing gathers around the performers until their identities become difficult to separate. The transition is never presented as a spectacular special effect. It happens almost conversationally, which makes the transformation more unsettling. One moment you hear a person singing; a few minutes later you seem to be hearing the memory of a person singing.

Then comes “Rents Are High Again And I Can't Touch The Sky”, lasting just twenty-five seconds. Its title is almost hilariously mundane compared with the metaphysical atmosphere surrounding it. It also introduces an important crack in the album’s otherwise ethereal surface. Rent is high. The sky remains inaccessible. Even experimental music, apparently, has to pay attention to the housing market eventually.

The miniature “Flame Distortion” continues this disruption, while “Waterfall” provides one of the album’s more substantial passages. Here the title suggests movement, but not necessarily the picturesque kind. The sound seems to pour rather than proceed, with textures continually changing shape without settling into a stable hierarchy. What is particularly effective is the refusal to make abstraction synonymous with coldness. There is still a physical quality to the music, especially in the interaction between the acoustic instruments and the voice.

That balance may be the album’s central achievement. "Volatile Poem" is certainly experimental, but its experimentation is not based on rejecting song. The original presentation of the project explicitly grew from an investigation into what a song might be, with Malheiro, Casellas and Azevedo working with voices, flute, cello and whatever else emerged during the process. The 2024 gnration presentation already described the project as an attempt to examine the form and beauty of song, while allowing improvisation and fragmentation into the composition.

Consequently, “Scream Study” is an especially revealing title. It treats one of the most primal human vocal actions as an object for investigation. A scream can express pain, anger, fear, pleasure, protest or simply the sudden realisation that somebody has put pineapple on pizza. I’A’V are interested in what remains when that expressive impulse becomes musical material. The piece does not need to settle on one emotional meaning. It can examine the sound itself, its pressure and its grain, without pretending that abstraction has somehow made the human element disappear.

“Everyone Should Be Loud”, at twenty-two seconds, is another tiny act of sabotage. After so much careful attention to nuance, silence and gradation, the title sounds almost like a political slogan issued by a particularly eccentric town council. Yet it fits the record’s interest in collective presence. These three musicians are constantly negotiating volume, density and space, and the album repeatedly suggests that listening together does not mean becoming identical.

That becomes crucial in the closing “I’m Here”, an eleven-and-a-half-minute piece that feels less like a finale than a sustained declaration of presence. The phrase is simple, almost embarrassingly so. But after an album spent so much time fragmenting voices and transforming instrumental identities, presence itself becomes meaningful. “I’m here” is not necessarily a statement of stability. It can also mean: I am still here despite everything that has happened to the sound around me.

This is where the title "Volatile Poem" finally makes sense. Volatility is not merely an aesthetic preference. It is the condition under which the three artists communicate. Their music does not resolve difference by smoothing it away. Instead, cello, flute, voice and electronics remain recognisable enough to retain their personalities while constantly disturbing one another’s boundaries.

The album’s physical format adds another amusing contradiction. The first edition on Sucata Tapes is a limited cassette release, with each copy accompanied by a unique 3D-printed I’A’V logo and random bits of sequins or glitter. It is difficult to imagine a better material joke for music that spends thirty-eight minutes refusing to stay materially stable: a fragile cassette containing sounds that are themselves continually mutating, dressed up with tiny pieces of celebratory debris. Experimental music occasionally remembers that it is allowed to have fun.

There is also a distinctly Portuguese context to the project, although "Volatile Poem" never turns regional identity into decoration. All three musicians are deeply connected to the contemporary Portuguese experimental scene, and the project itself grew out of gnration’s Radiografia programme, which was designed to foreground emerging composers and practices in Braga. The residency gave the trio a specific institutional starting point, but the music quickly outgrows that context.

What remains after repeated listening is not a particular melody or electronic trick, but a sensation of continual negotiation. The album is constantly deciding how much of itself should be exposed and how much should be obscured. Its most beautiful passages are often those in which the answer remains unresolved: a flute breath interrupted by electronics, a cello phrase disappearing into processing, a voice suddenly becoming texture and then returning as a person.

There is something almost tender about that instability. "Volatile Poem" does not treat transformation as a way of escaping humanity. Quite the opposite. It keeps returning to the body: breath, voice, strings, resonance, vibration. The electronic elements may distort these things, but they cannot completely erase their origins.

I’A’V therefore make a record about becoming something else without quite becoming unrecognisable. Its songs do not break apart because composition has failed. They break apart because the three musicians have discovered that fragmentation can be another form of togetherness. The poem is volatile precisely because it is alive, and "Volatile Poem" is at its most convincing when it lets that life remain slightly out of control.

According to his Discogs page, Charles Lareau hails from Green Bay, Wisconsin and is now based in Hangzhou, China. I was unfamiliar with his work, but the liner notes credits Lareau with "tapes and electronics," so I had some sense of what I was getting myself into. These tracks were recorded in 2021 & 2022 in Shanghai, China. Let's dive in and see what we have here.

We open with "aixst00," which is gritty machine noise. Imagine running a two-stroke engine though a series of effects and you get a sense of what you are in for. "Transistor" is heavily processed warbling static and analogue tones. I like the rawness of this and there is a minimalism here that is engaging. Finally, "algosphere" keeps the minimalism going with a lot of drone and ambience. If you are looking for atmosphere, this is where you will find it.

Flipping the tape over, we begin with "0II0I," which is an interesting mix of field recordings of singing and music buried under a wall of tape hiss and other noises. "Airwaves" is a short piece that brings some noise, with a repetitive static crunch and high-pitched radio noises. Finally, we close it off with "trajectory," which at 13:06 is the longest track on the release. The track kicks off with a static blast, but then quickly relaxes with some peaceful drone. This has the feel of being done in real time with one take, as there are sudden shifts at times. This settles into a heavily distorted drone piece that constantly evolves and shifts over time. Bits of static hiss come along for the ride and then vanish, tapes sounds like they are getting eaten for a brief moment, and suddenly it is over.

This is one of those nebulous releases that are a bit difficult to categorize. It is noisy, but not really noise. A bit too noisy to be ambient though. But it is very well done and a nice listen. Lareau manages to keep everything interesting by not getting too bogged down in formula. If you like tape experimentation with a lot of processing, this will be up your alley. Well worth checking out. This release weighs in at around 40 minutes.

The Discogs entry for this artist has several aliases, including: 69, Destroy Date, E.J. Vodka, Edward Giles, and Unknown Hierarchy. Edward Giles is a member of +DOG+, among many others. Now let's talk a bit about the title for a moment. "Food Desert Created By Neighborhood Gentrification" is a real thing, so although many completely disregard noise, I figure any attention we can get to such issues is worthwhile. The liner notes state that "WALLMART "Food Desert" is a new fifteen plus HNW track about an old subject. While the need for commercial property starts to diminish as retail shopping goes online. Many smaller "brick & mortar stores" have suffered the impact of the "big box" model of retail. The seemingly lower prices are never offset by the loss of local businesses that have shuttered their doors as commercial property developers continue to buy up neglected, underutilized land to create "food deserts" that lower income shoppers cannot access or afford." I have personally seen such food deserts in my work, so all I can say is "preach, brother." As for Wallmart? No bonus points for figuring out what we are in for here, so let's get past the geriatric greeter and see what the people in the blue vests have on sale today.

As you may have figured out based on the name and the fact that it's being released by Inner Demons Records, this is some heavy harsh noise wall. Over fifteen and a half minutes, the track grinds and stutters away in a cacophony of electronic noise. There is a lot going on in the track with a nice bass undercurrent to keep everything grounded. At the end, it cuts out to some hum and a brief news report about a store closure.

Overall, this is some nice wall of noise with a socially conscious point that one would be hard pressed to oppose. I am not the biggest fan of harsh noise wall (I prefer the "everything including the kitchen sink" variety of noise), but I found this to be engaging. This album weighs in at just over 15 minutes.

I previously reviewed Gensai Hasegawa’s “Life and Death in the Quarantines” and enjoyed it, so I was interested to hear how he would sound in a collaboration. Hasegawa hails from Tokyo Japan, and began producing music at the age of 50 after aa long career as a systems engineer. I could not find much about Miko because my Japanese is limited to what I have learned from manga and anime. From what I could gather, she focuses on voice and piano. So with only my knowledge of Hasegawa’s work and a host of mystery guests, let’s dive in.

We open up with “The City Wears a Folk Hat,” which has more participants than a bad rap track from the 90s. The participants include: Miko, (Sebaebi), (Ripuchuwan), (Ikemen Tomozo), (Wan), (Opu), (Kabochan), (Oshin), (Kuwati), (Shachiku Baba), (Roa), (EAPAI), (Rei), (Rikuto), (Momo) and Gensai Hasegawa. We open with a guy yelling, then other random noises added into the mix. There are people making vocalizations and other noises with their voice. Add to this some stringed instruments and flutes, and you have an odd composition. Imagine a person beatboxing and then making slurping sounds and animal noises. There is some spoken word, but I know very little Japanese, so I am no help here. This is weird and not likely to be everyone's cup of tea, but it is certainly interesting. “The City's Light” closes out the album and is a complete departure from the mellowness of the prior track. This is solely the work of Gensai Hasegawa and it lays down some harsh noise wall with plenty of static, bits of analog tones, and some line noise added in for good measure. Overall, this is a nice wall.

In short, if anyone came here to get mellow, the first track may do the trick. If you came to get some heavy noise blasts, the second track will do the trick. It's weird, but interesting. If you like some of the stranger stuff on Public Eyesore Records, this is worth checking out. This album weighs in at around 17 minutes.