Discus Throwing – The Bridge Sessions

 

Music is flying everywhere, without its propeller that is the disc, which has become ever rarer, although it still should still be relevant. Perhaps it needs to be more closely associated to a collective adventure, individuals, locations, moments, stories, coordinates – in a nutshell, strange things.

“Sonic Communion” – the first release by the record label The Bridge Sessions – also documents the first French-American ensemble to have crossed this bridge, this transatlantic network for exchanges between creative musicians, to France, in October 2013. The disc was released just in time for the return trip of this same ensemble, to Chicago, in April and May 2015. Many other notes, travel logs, drawings, photos, films, and holograms, all threads in the same web as the disc, are available on our archive page

This is always how it’ll be: the objective of the label and the network is to record each ensemble during its first tour and make an album to support their next tour, and those beyond. Which is why the idea of “documenting” doesn’t seem limiting to us, but should and will complete the “direction of the art”, especially when it comes to a music that is improvised, and for which leaving a trace has never been obvious or an end in itself.

What are our motives?

First of all, it should be known that we are contrarians; and contrarianism is after all the driving force of History: a few years ago, when the world was crushed by the weight of too many objects, knick-knacks, and gadgets, disintegrating them was our common dream. Now, since almost everything is being dematerialized, we can only think of putting odd objects in circulation and defending a tactile pleasure that’s not limited to the daily swiping of the never-ending surface of screens.

We aren’t forgetting either that, for several millennia, music was spared from being recorded, and from being broadcast in any way but by women and men taking their instruments, and being taken by them. Everything comes from performance and goes back to performance. All it took was one technology and its production line to, in the span of a few years after World War I, jumpstart the production of discs from half a million to a hundred million a year and, in the 1970s, lead to a music industry that generated more profits than movies or sports. That happened. We all know the story, from the first firms to the majors and their fusion, and their collapse, while independent labels seemed more and more like clandestine labels. Starting as a luxury good, the disc, in one form or another, became a household object, a commodity, a relic. A new technology replaced a new technology, and every time all they can talk about is “democratization”.

We are therefore launching The Bridge Sessions, in 2015, because it is too late; while the collapse of the market value of the disc-object wants to drag along the object-disc. And because we do not underestimate the highly revelatory fact that this word is the only one that refers to realities as much in anatomy as in astronomy, in geometry, in watchmaking, in computer science, and in train signaling (not forgetting the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey). In these capacities, The Bridge Sessions will not give up on the hazardous yet oh so fulfilling practice of discus throwing.

All our releases are available at thebridgesessions.bandcamp.com