Otto

The fascinating and excellent Franco-Bulgarian Otto trio (percussionists Pol Small, Gabriel Valtchev and Camille Emaille) craft a music that is minimalist in its initial vocabulary, but all-encompassing and exponential in its energy and live performance.

The three musicians gather around the same instrument, the tapan (a Bulgarian percussion instrument with only two skin tones), to which metal percussion (gong, bronze plate) is gradually added. Beginning their sets with a progression on a traditional Bulgarian seven-beat rhythm that, through successive shifts from one tapan to the next, reveals increasingly complex polyrhythms, the OTTO trio play on the transcendent repetition of the cycle, bringing to life variations in timbre, rhythm and color that, depending on the performance space, can be highly variable. This ascension bursts forth when the unison returns, albeit furtively, seeming to relieve the tension that arises once again with the appearance of the metallic timbre, brought by a gong, powerful, round and squeaky, giving way to an explosive final improvisation_apotheosis, mechanical, jerky and noisy all at once.