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Music

The Creators Project At The Gaîté Lyrique: Weekend Recap

After Lyon, our French event series made a last halt in the heart of Paris with new artworks, performances and great music. Next stop: Brazil.

In Lyon, our installations were scattered all over the city, cropping up in all the Nuits sonores festival venues to lend an avant-garde artistic experience to the electronic music festival. Each was intended to create a specific link—architectural or emotional—with its exhibition space, the best example being UVA's futuristic gateway, which heralded the main entrance of the festival’s biggest concert venue.

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In Paris, the artistic approach was very much the same, but this time our numerous artworks were concentrated within one space—the monumental digital arts center Gaité lyrique—which was transformed over the course of our three day event. Each floor and all the encompassing rooms of the newly opened venue hosted one or more installations. In compliance with the center's curatorial credo, the exhibition intended to break free from the conventional codes of gallery and museum exhibitions by overcoming the distinction between “exhibition space” and “circulation space.”

“72” by Trafik

During those three days, the whole place was turned into a living art gallery, animated as much by the participation of the visitors and their trajectories through the space as by the video-driven and reactive installations. This long art continuum, from the ground floor to the concert hall, from the historic bar to the petite salle (the “small room” that hosted the Life on Mars), culminated in the grand concert hall in the evenings for nights filled with the raucous sounds of musical performances from some of our favorite bands and DJs.

“Life on Mars Revisited” by David Bowie, Mick Rock, and Barney Clay.

Our concerts and live shows this weekend were not designed as an accompaniment or supplement to our artistic components, rather, they were at the heart of what we wanted to initiate in Paris. The large concert hall, located at the very center of the Gaité lyrique, is a testimony to the importance given to music within the artistic identity of this new multidisciplinary and experimental venue. During its opening week last February, the Gaîté lyrique struck the Parisian crowds with a clever mix of cutting-edge exhibitions and indie concerts. For us, music is a medium of choice, practiced and explored by many of our Creators.

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Those live shows were therefore an opportunity to demonstrate the shared ideals and the fruitful artistic partnership between The Creators Project and the Gaité lyrique, and also, to be completely honest, an excuse to have some great parties in an awesome space. On Thursday night, the legendary and very rare—at least on continental Europe—Squarepusher, proved he was still a master at live shows, and, maybe ore surprisingly, that he mastered a wide range of analog instruments. His music has also broadened over the years, stemming from UK-based ghetto sub-scenes like Drum ’n' Bass to more pop-friendly and yet still sharp melodic compositions. Before him, Creator Cameron Messirow (aka Glasser) also merged genres, adding electronic synths, loops and beats to her pure and idiosyncratic voice. Her delivery on stage is baffling, with the singing simple and soft, while at times almost athletic, with sophisticated vibratos and high-pitched verses. Once again, she proved she can't be forced into any rigid or lazy category, like “modern trip-hop” or “today's Bjork,” but that she is a very singular and accomplished artist in her own right.

Acid Washed performing.

On Saturday night, all the producers, bands and DJs on stage seemed to have joined forces to take aim at electro in expanding its margins. Yuksek premiered his new live show, Adam Kesher played his last album, which combines rock with post-DFA groovy sound and electro, while newcomers Acid Washed really impressed with their common take on slowed synth disco and efficient classic house.

Check out our photo galleries from the event here and here.

Photos: Steve Wells.