This evening we celebrate the multimedia work Le Rêve, created by Arnaud Lechat for himself (flutes and percussion), Mark van Tongeren (voices, jaw harps, shruti box) and Zhan Yachun (dance). Arnaud and Mark recorded a music-only version in april 2024, which was published in November. Sound recordist Yannick Dauby recorded and mastered the album, and brings his equipment for an audiofile listening session in the bookstore. The collaborators of Le Rêve and percussionist Mona Kaveh Ahangari will provide context of the project. Besides the album itself and photos of the project, there will be some short live impressions of Le Rêve and an unpublished version of one track.
Nous avons le plaisir de vous inviter à célébrer la naissance de l’œuvre multi-instrument “Le Rêve” lors de cette “Listening Party”.
“Le Rêve” est une création dirigée par Arnaud Lechat (貓阿諾), qui y joue de la flûte, Daf et Bendir, avec la participation de Mark van Tongeren (voix, guimbardes, shruti box) et Zhan Yachun (詹雅淳) à la danse. Arnaud et Mark ont enregistré une version purement musicale en avril 2024, sortie en novembre de la même année. L’enregistrement et le mastering ont été réalisés par Yannick Dauby (澎葉生), qui assurera pour l’occasion une expérience d’écoute de haute qualité grâce à son matériel professionnel. L’équipe de création de “Le Rêve” ainsi que la percussionniste Mona Kaveh Ahangari présenteront les origines de ce projet. En plus de l’album et de contenus audio-visuels, la soirée comprendra une performance improvisée ainsi qu’une version inédite d’un des morceaux.
夢境｝Listening Party : Le Rêve
信鴿法國書店很高興邀請各位讀者透過這場Listening Party，一起來慶祝《夢境 Le Rêve》這部多樂器作品的誕生。
《夢境 Le Rêve》由負責蕭與打擊樂的貓阿諾領銜創作，加上Mark van Tongeren的人聲、口簧、Shruti box演出以及詹雅淳的舞蹈表演。貓阿諾與 Mark 於2024年4月錄製了純音樂版，於同年11月發行。聲音錄製與母帶處理由澎葉生負責，本場Listening Party將由他以專業設備帶來高品質聆聽體驗。《夢境 Le Rêve》的創作團隊，以及打擊樂手 Mona Kaveh Ahangari，將為大家介紹計畫起源。除了專輯本身及相關影音作品外，現場也將呈現即興演出以及一首尚未發表的曲目版本。
Listening Party – Le Rêve
時間 Date / 地點 Lieu
2025.04.25 ven. 19:30 Librairie Le Pigeonnier 信鴿法國書店
報名 | Inscription | reservations compulsory
* 本活動已額滿 *
* Complet *
* sold out *
* 本活動將以法中雙語語進行，英語輔助。 Cette rencontre se déroulera en bilingue français-chinois. This event is bilingual French/Mandarin.
The physical album is now available in stores across Taiwan and will be available around the world on all the major streaming services by the time of the Listening Party.
Arnaud Lechat est un musicien et compositeur français installé à Taiwan. Il travaille pour de nombreuses pièces de danse, d’improvisation moderne, de cirque, de littérature et de poésie, ainsi que pour le dessin et le cinéma. Arnaud est co-réalisateur du film documentaire “Doumadiao” sur l’opéra taïwanais et l’auteur de nombreux documentaires pour Radio Taiwan Internationale sur les musiques de Taiwan dans son émission “Désorientales”. Il a récemment publié trois albums : “Delivrænce 9”, “Transhuman / Subhuman” et “Sur les ailes de l’heure bleue”. Un quatrième album, “Le Rêve”, réalisé en duo avec Mark van Tongeren, vient également de sortir.
貓阿諾 Arnaud Lechat
法國音樂家貓阿諾 Arnaud Lechat 是一位居住在台灣的法國音樂家和作曲家。在長達 25 年的創作生涯中，他參與了許多現代舞、即興音樂、馬戲、文學與詩歌、雜技、繪畫和電影的作品。貓阿諾是探討台灣歌仔戲的紀錄片《Doumadiao》的共同導演，同時也是台灣廣播電台節目《Désorientales》的多部台灣音樂紀錄片的製作人。他曾發行：《Delivrænce 9》、《Transhuman / Subhuman》以及《Sur les ailes de l’heure bleue》等三張專輯，並與 Mark van Tongeren 合作，在2024年推出了第四張專輯《Le Rêve》。
Zhan Yachun
Born in Taichung, Taiwan. She is a freelance performer, dance art creator and performance art teacher. She likes to explore her own possibilities through experimentation and improvisation in dance art. By chance, she began to collaborate with different musicians as a dancer in improvisation concerts in these few years. Current works include 2018 « Ridiculous », « Neverland », 2020 « The », 2021 « An Imagination About the Soul » video version, 2022 « Fairy Tale Life Accident », « Untitled »,2023 in D-Lab which is a platform of create to published «Caterpillar» ,2024 «Lady W & Lady M».
Zhan Yachun, née à Taichung, Taïwan, est une artiste indépendante et enseignante en arts de la performance. Elle explore les possibilités de la danse à travers l’expérimentation et l’improvisation. Ces dernières années, elle a commencé à collaborer avec des musiciens en tant que danseuse lors de concerts d’improvisation. Elle continue également de créer des œuvres de danse. Parmi ses récents travaux figurent Ridiculous (2018), Neverland et The (2020), An Imagination About the Soul (version vidéo, 2021), Fairy Tale Life Accident et Untitled (2022), ainsi que Caterpillar en 2023 sur la plateforme D-Lab. En 2024, elle a créé Lady W & Lady M.
詹雅淳 Zhan Yachun
來自於台中的詹雅淳是一位自由表演者、舞蹈藝術創作者及表演藝術教師。她喜歡透過實驗和即興創作來探索自己在舞蹈藝術中的可能性。近幾年來，她偶然開始作為舞者與不同音樂家合作參與即興演出。並持續創作舞蹈肢體作品。近期作品包括 2018 年的《Ridiculous》，《Neverland》，2020 年的《The》，2021 年的《An Imagination About the Soul》影片版，2022 年的《Fairy Tale Life Accident》，《Untitled》，2023 年在 D-Lab 平台上創作並發表的《Caterpillar》，以及 2024 年的《Lady W & Lady M》。
Yannick Dauby (France / Taiwan)
Sound artist and field recordist. Sound designer/mixer for cinéma.
Audio documentary, experimental music and micro-movies enthusiast.
Inspired by ethnographic practices, stories about forests & mountains and marine ecology. Collaborates with communities in rural Taiwan and Indigenous territories.
Enregistrement de terrain et création sonore. Post-production audio pour l’image. Amateur de documentaires sonores, de musique expérimentale et de micro-cinéma. Inspiré par la pratique de l’ethnographie, les histoires de montagnes et de forêts et l’écologie marine. Collabore avec des communautés rurales et aborigènes à Taiwan.
Mona Kaveh Ahangari, née à Téhéran en 1982, a débuté sa carrière musicale en 2005 et est devenue une joueuse de daf de niveau avancé en 2013. Elle a joué avec des ensembles renommés en Iran et à l’international avant de fonder le Barin Ensemble en 2016. En s’installant à Taïwan en 2018, elle est devenue la seule enseignante de daf du pays, organisant des concerts et des ateliers pour promouvoir la musique et la culture iraniennes. En 2020, elle a fondé le Mastaneh Music Band et le Daf Ensemble, les seuls groupes taïwanais dédiés à la musique iranienne, mettant en avant des musiciens taïwanais interprétant des rythmes iraniens. À travers sa musique et ses performances, elle continue de favoriser les échanges culturels.
Mark van Tongeren 是一位民族音樂學家和音樂家，擁有萊頓大學創意與表演藝術學院的藝術研究博士學位。他有超過 30 年的戲劇、音樂和舞蹈製作經驗，並曾在西伯利亞、台灣和藏族僑民社區進行田野調查。他以在泛音歌唱和圖瓦 khöömei 音樂領域的工作而聞名，並通過他的書籍《Overtone Singing》（Terra Nova Press 2022）以及他的專輯《Anthology of Overtone Singing》展示了這些研究成果。他是國際音樂與舞蹈傳統理事會原住民音樂與舞蹈學術小組的副主席，並曾或目前與 Silo Theatre、Oorbeek、Parafonia、IUooUI 等團體以及許多其他藝術家合作。
Mark van Tongeren est un ethnomusicologue et musicien titulaire d’un doctorat en recherche artistique de l’Académie des Arts Créatifs et Performants de l’Université de Leiden. Il possède plus de 30 ans d’expérience dans les productions théâtrales, musicales et de danse, et a effectué des travaux de terrain en Sibérie, à Taiwan et au sein de la diaspora tibétaine. Il est surtout connu pour son travail dans le domaine du chant harmonique et du khöömei touvain, à travers son livre Overtone Singing (Terra Nova Press 2022) et son album Anthology of Overtone Singing. Il est vice-président du groupe d’étude pour la musique et la danse indigènes du Conseil international pour les traditions de la musique et de la danse, et a été ou est encore actif au sein des groupes Silo Theatre, Oorbeek, Parafonia, IUooUI et avec de nombreux autres artistes.
Le Rêve is an album that sprouted from the imagination of the French multi-instrumentalist Arnaud Lechat one Monday afternoon, late 2022. The inspiration was the painting Le Rêve and other work by Henri Rousseau, the fascinating naïve painter in fin-de-siècle / early 1900s Paris. In one inspired flow, Arnaud heard the parts for his own instruments and those I would play or sing. He recorded his own parts that afternoon, one by one as multi-track pieces. Then he invited me to add my own parts, specifying the instruments, moods and such. In a short while, everything fell together wonderfully well. Arnaud arranged the first performance with dancer Zhan Yachun, and several more followed. After those, we created a music-only version of Le Rêve.
When I announced this upcoming album earlier this year, I was in very good spirits about the collaboration with Arnaud. There was the musical click we had had during previous projects, and an intensified click from the music he created for the two of us. We had had frequent contact for over a year about this production, and decided about many issues for the release together. We got close to the stage of pressing the album and needed one final meeting for the last issues regarding the design. And then, all of a sudden, Arnaud was no more.
A big shock.
Our dreams to play this album live vanished. Our dreams for more projects could only remain dreams. The title of the album (which translates as ‘the dream’) haunted me in strange ways. I realised afterwards that the last café where we had met was called Dreamers Coffee. Two days after he left us (and also the day after the gig we had to play without him in Kaohsiung), fate steered me to a café to meet someone, the only option left over. The name? Rêve.
Most of all, it was hard to grasp the reality that someone about my age living a healthy life, died so sudden.
It became clear how Arnaud had touched many people with this generosity and curiosity. He had set up many collaborations, getting the best out of a great variety of people. Some of them did not even consider themselves an artist. Arnaud recognised a talent and created nourishing conditions and used his organising skills so that the talent could emerge, and then merge with his own.
What a privilege it was to know Arnaud, albeit for a few years. And to experience the genesis of a new way to combine improvisation with compositional sketches. Arnaud’s passing is a tremendous loss for the many artists and music lovers, here in the greater Taipei area, and further afield.
Click on the image below to go to Bandcamp to listen,
to buy the physical album
and/or to buy the downloadable audiofiles.
Please note: If you buy / bought Le Rêve through Bandcamp, you use the Bandcamp download function to get your files. Outside Bandcamp (for example when you bought the physical CD), you can use the QR code to go to the Proton-cloud to get your files. If you encounter any problems, let us know and we’ll help you out.
The 1910 painting by Henri Rousseau which inspired Arnaud to write his new work
Trio Allsymt was to have its first performance under this name tomorrow, but something tragic and totally unexpected happened: our dear friend Arnaud Lechat passed away on the morning of September 19 while being out for a walk. He inspired many of us with his playing, composing, organising, talking, thinking. We won’t have our first concert as a trio under our new name. But Arnaud left us a website which he put together last weekend, looking back at how we,”Three Free Guys” played together, without the name Allsymt: https://allsymt.wordpress.com/.
Arnaud, come and listen tomorrow, we play in your honour. Bon voyage dans l’éternel, salut!
For the concert we found Lin Hsiao Feng willing to replace Arnaud.
***
In 2021 Taipei pianist Lee Shih-Yang formed a new trio with wind instrument / percussion player Arnaud Lechat and vocal performer Mark van Tongeren, playing frequently in the greater Taipei area. Independently of each other, Lee and Lechat had over a decade of collaborations with dancers behind them. Van Tongeren played and recorded in music-theatre projects in unusual acoustic and architectural settings since the 1990s.
From 2024, the trio Lee – Lechat – van Tongeren continues as ALLsymt, an acronym of the musicians’ initials.
For the exhibition 高美館30周年鉅獻英國泰德現代美術館《CAPTURING THE MOMENT》瞬間──穿越繪畫與攝影之旅 in the Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum ALLsymt created new pieces. They use the museum lobby, the passage to the art works it holds, to interrogate the relationship between photography and painting, realism and simulacrum, makers and perceivers. They create a musical lens enabling visitors to “hear” a specific selection of paintings on exhibit, by questioning the complex relationships between acoustic event and situated, individual perception. Some of the techniques they use to achieve this effect are spatial projection of the sound by acoustic means, moving sound sources, and extremely slow and silent passages.
The paintings that feature in Allsymt’s interpretations are, in order of appearance:
Piece 1 Feeling the Space. Not based on painting
Piece 2 based on The Sea by Sugimoto
Piece 3 based on Motifs by Warhol
Piece 4 based on Face by Bacon
Piece 5 based on Aunt Marianne by Richter
Piece 6 based on A Sudden Gust of Wind by Jeff Wall
Piece 7 Interfering with space. Not based on painting
For more about the musicians you can check out the special Allsymt page. Their current project draws from their ecclectic range of muliti-disciplinary backgrounds and involves dancer Chan Ya-Chun. She recently graduated from the University of Taipei department of dance and was first invited by Lechat for collaborative performances. Currently, she is a freelance performer, dance art creator and performance art teacher. She likes to explore her own possibilities through experimentation and improvisation in dance art. At the same time, she continues to collaborate with different choreographers in Taiwan and abroad and takes the opportunity to dance and create in different places.
近期經歷為參與2024年臺北藝穗節共創作品《Lady W & Lady M》與2022年的《童話故事 人生事故》。於2023年獲得菁霖美國舞蹈節獎學金，同年與音樂家Arnaud Lechat 、Mark Van Tongeren共同演出《夢境》等等。
Lechat and van Tongeren have already collaborated with Zhan for the project Le Rêve, based on the painting of the same name by Henri Rousseau. A recording of that project’s music is due to be released in October 2024 and is available for pre-ordering on Bandcamp.
Le Rêve by Henri Rousseau (1910)
Album cover, Le Rêve by Lechat / van Tongeren (2024)
Exhibition:
高美館30周年鉅獻英國泰德現代美術館
《CAPTURING THE MOMENT》
瞬間──穿越繪畫與攝影之旅
in the Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum.
The performance takes place on Friday evening, September 20 at 19:30.
All of a sudden, Arnaud Lechat passed away on September 19, in the midst of many fine projects he was working on. Not long before, Arnaud had launched several websites, one for this album project (https://lerevemusic.tumblr.com/ ), another for our ALLsymt trio.
His widow immediately decided the album should still be released, but we experienced some delays.
We expect the physical album to be ready on November 7, the way Arnaud prepared and intended it.
For now, do not order the album on Arnaud’s Bandcamp while we are sorting out if and how his account there can be continued.
We will soon add a button to buy the album directly and create a new post, but you can also follow the procedure explained below.
It is time to round up some support for our next album project. Below you can read how to suport our album, but first some more on the genesis of this music and dance piece. Over the last 12 months or so I played quite a few iterations of Arnaud Lechat’s wonderful cycle of compositions called Le Rêve, based on the painting by Henri Rousseau. Arnaud recorded his own parts for flutes, percussion and voice on one afternoon, a year ago or so. He sent me the tracks and soon after I came over to play parts on voice, flutes, mouth-harps and effects, the way he had it in mind. It fitted seamlessly so we did several performances with a dancer. Each time it was different. Some things got better, some things failed or were less interesting. Each time we had Zhan Yachun dancing with us.
The new challenge was to play the music without her dancing. We tried several times. Each time it was different, very different. But the shape became sharp. This year on Fools’ Day, we committed our audio-only version to the recording machine of French recording expert Yannick Dauby. The result was beyond our expectation. We are really excited to put this album into the world: for musicians this is always a special process and event. And not without obstacles. I have had long discussions with Arnaud about the question: to print or not to print? Fewer and fewer people have CD players. Even the car, which was the last bulwark of CD players for many people, is changing to audio and video streaming now. For decades – what I say? – for a hundred or more years, selling records was a means of generating an income for musicians.
The 1910 painting by Henri Rousseau which inspired Arnaud to write his new work
With that epoch coming to an end, one of the ‘traditional’ ways for a musician or record label to recuperate the cost of recording, desiging, printing, distributing and promoting an album is challenging. For 20 years or so we enjoyed the ability to record cheaper, in high quality, and produce small print-runs of CDs. But now physical things are harder to sell. Arnaud tried making an album with a beautiful booklet with poems and art work and a download code – no CD inside. It did not work: buyers still wanted a CD, not just the booklet with download code. But as time goes on, even our CDs are selling fewer and fewer at concerts.
And yet, being musicians, produce we must. The physical CD, a digipack or something similar in carton, without booklet, is taking shape (see the top of the message to get an impression of where the design is going at the moment).
Watch an excerpt from one of the live performances we did of this album, when it was still primarily a music & dance performance (which it also will be: we will do sections of Le Rêve in an entirely new setting in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in september).
I will spare you the details of why and how we came to the conclusion to put out a physical album in 2024. You can read that in my newsletter if you like (sign up if you like). Here is how you can support us, in order of urgency (most urgent support comes first):
1. Pre-order the album in the making from us, so that we can get part of the production cost together instead of investing our savings. Pay to my bank account or Paypal (see below).
2. Pre-order the album when we (Arnaud and Mark) put it on our Bandcamp pages. Bandcamp is a fantastic medium which pays a very large share to musicians. Compared to Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube it is a musician’s heaven, and a place where fans can express their interest in a very concrete way. Bandcamp is right when it claims that “artists receive 80-85% of every dollar a fan spends” and they pay very soon too, not after 6 or 12 months.
3. Buy the album when it is out, from us or from Bandcamp, or at a concert. You might never play the actual CD, we know, but you can get a download code and we can plan our next album, because people like you bought this one!
One last option: if there hides a philantrope in you, if you like to support the arts and other causes, and if you can easily spend some more, consider to pay more than just the album price. Basically, this is like tipping a waiter, or even sponsoring a project. Bandcamp too has this function to pay more than the set price, and in the last two years I noticed every once in a while fans do indeed pay extra! Every bit counts and the gesture itself is already very encouraging. If you pay more than the album price we have more chances to do more promotion, put out more albums, etc. If you want to support in a more substantial way and are interested in return-favors (a dedication in the album sleeve, a concert at home, etc.), please let us know by sending an email.
Pre-order Le Rêve now!
1. Make your choice:
CD with download code € 15,- + worldwide shipping € 10,- = € 25,-
CD with download code € 15,- + europe shipping € 7,- = € 22,-
CD with download code € 15,- + Netherlands shipping € 5,- = € 20,-
CD with download code NT$ 500,- + Taiwan shipping NT$ 80,- = NT$ 580
Ask us for special rates, for example sending to Japan from Taiwan.
Send a message to info@fusica.nl and cc to Hsi-Yin (hsiyin724@gmail.com) with ‘DreamOrder’ in the subject header or title. Make sure to leave your name + full address + phone (optional) and also let us know your banking name / last 3 digits (for Taiwan).
4. In the planned release month September or October we will send you the album as soon as it is out!
