Music & Visions – projects selected by Stefano Santoni + ThePT
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Mélanie De Biasio (born 12 July 1978, Charleroi, Belgium) is a Belgian jazz singer.
Born to a Belgian mother and an Italian father, Mélanie De Biasio learnt ballet from the age of three, and started playing the Western concert flute at eight. At the age of 12, she joined the Ensemble de l’Harmonie de Charleroi with whom she toured Canada for a month. During her adolescence, she further improved her voice and diction.
Being a fan of groups like Nirvana, she sang and composed in English in a rock band at age 15. She played in several groups before totally setting her mind to jazz with the trio Harmadik Fül. With them, she learnt to improvise while discovering the many facets of music. After three years of singing studies at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, she was awarded a first prize with a distinction degree. After that, she toured in Russia, in which she gained further professional experience. This is when Steve Houben (Belgian jazz musician and saxophone professor at the Conservatory) asked her to appear in concert with him, allowing her to play in numerous festivals and other large music events in Belgium.
De Biasio has sung and played the flute with noted Belgian jazz musicians such as Pascal Mohy, Michel Herr, Jan de Haas and Philippe Aerts, and was nominated for a Django d’Or award in 2006, in the “Young Talent” category.
One year later, she released her first album, A Stomach Is Burning, for the Igloo label. It was favorably received by the critics and won the “Best Jazz Album” award at Les Octaves de la Musique.
In 2011, De Biasio worked with prisoners in a collective creative process using voice, movement, breath and rhythm to awaken the creative spirit, in collaboration with Avanti ASBL that led to a critically acclaimed performance in the prison.
Two years later, she collaborated with grammy award-winning saxophonist Charles Neville and performed “Paradise Isn’t Enough” in the United States.
Her second album, No Deal, released in 2013 on PIAS, was described as a simple and sensual work. In 2014, she became the second Belgian artist to play on Later… with Jools Holland, after Zap Mama almost 20 years earlier. She supported the Eels on their European tour. The album was remixed and released worldwide by PIAS UK in 2015. That same year, De Biasio headlined the famous Montreux Jazz Tokyo Festival.
Her EP Blackened Cities was released in May 2016 and was again well received by numerous reviews. (wikipedia)
Matthieu Bourel
Data-ism
Power of images and their combinations. Therefore all kinds of diversions. As well in music, sounds or films. Playing with elements, to make it mine.
In Collage, I like to watch every picture as the point of departure for a story. Various durations, gathered in one. to evoke a fake history or inspire nostalgia for a period in time that never truly existed. Sometimes further to a decision. Mostly random.
The obsession of collecting disparate images from books, old magazines and other found material becomes as much a part of the emerging image as the mark-making. A piece often becomes about the search and desire to combine those emergent narrative symbols that seem charged with a familiar yet distant emotion.
When successful, all the elements fall together with irony and tension while all other realities are obliterated, leaving the viewer as participant inside the picture, with his own codes and connections. The image then carries the weight of a personal reality. Most important, the final image actually gains a significant evocative quality I could not have expressed in any other way.
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Heroes
Max Ernst / Magritte / Jean Tinguely / Jiri Kolar / Dali / Pollock / Kurt Schwitters / Jean Arp / Basquiat / Braque / Hannah Höch / Kandinsky / Picasso / Chagal / Picabia / Miro / Mondrian / Suehiro Maruo / Cubists / Constructivists / abstractionnists / Suprematists & everything else.
“Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.” Max Ernst. Quoted in Saranne Alexandrian Surrealist Art (1970).
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