Among all the paradoxes of communication, which improvisational musicians explore continuously as connoisseurs to create magic, there is the fact that they speak at the same time (something we are generally discouraged from doing). Not only that, but they have the quartering ability to listen and hear each other while speaking at the same time. Reversal of the situation for better sharing: to hear each other better, to hear everything better, it would really be better if we all got into the habit of speaking at the same time. If we invented other ways of weaving together. Here, the double bassist and the pianist speak (articulate and disarticulate), play (converse and convert), it’s the same, at the same time and in staggered times that they cross like two needles piercing a fabric – let’s say the Golden Fleece. The two, together and separately, a world in suspense and a world in delirium, and we who listen to them are scattered and reunited.
For one does not merely listen to what the other is doing beside them or through them, in order to proceed during this same diffracted time with what they have to do: each continues on their own momentum, a momentum that would not be what it is if the other did not intervene, whether this is taken into account or not. What the other says is always believable and unbelievable, and the same is true for the other through the mirror. Their parallel narratives are capricious, their perpendiculars striking. In what Santacruz and Wodrascka do, together and separately, there is always something else that hooks, that unhooks, that slips, a slippage of meaning, a circulation of energies, and which passes over, passes elsewhere, passes unnoticed, or not, but returns, in slow motion for one, in fast motion for the other, at several speeds, in several temporalities, several dimensions, different, changed forever, as is – and there is that which no one has paid attention to but which connects and joins. And we who listen to them do this have complete freedom to continue what they have begun by half-building this labyrinth. It’s a bit like a curvature of space-time, if you like: our listening is part of their listening. We talk with them as they talk at the same time, and then the world (suspended, delirious) responds.
You can check it out. Most often, the double bass exerts a tiny amount of pressure on the piano, which exerts a tiny amount of pressure on the double bass (both undoubtedly activate secret mechanisms), and the two open up and blossom. Delight in requests coming thick and fast. The more the pressures swarm, the more miniature devils escape from everywhere, from all objects, which are therefore sound objects, which are therefore boxes. When they do not offer each other graceful resistance, Bernard Santacruz and Christine Wodrascka spend the rest of their time moving forward in disguise. Princess and pirate. Prince and piratess. It is not uncommon for the piano to knock on the window of the double bass, pale like a ghost passing through, nor is it uncommon for the double bass to cast its shadow over the precipice of the piano, like a bridge spanning a river. And if you continue to listen conscientiously, or not, you will hear a whole bestiary, the kind that hid under your bed when you were a child, and still does today for that matter. Inevitably creatures cast threatening or grotesque shadows, inevitably flames crawl on the back of a rocking centaur. They collide or they occult each other, eclipse each other. They brush against each other and fray. They flake away. They engulf each other. Dissolve, mix and reconstitute themselves. They dissipate, annihilate each other. And sometimes they embark on a pilgrimage toward silence.
Listen again, I’m reshuffling their cards, their music (their titles are also significant). They collide (Ricochets, naturally, and Vif-argent) or they occult each other, eclipse each other (Et si on). They brush against each other and fray (Kudoda). They flake away (Voyage exploratoire). They engulf each other (Princesse et pirate). Dissolve, mix and reconstitute themselves (Choral). They dissipate, annihilate each other. And sometimes they embark on a pilgrimage toward silence, as in the unfathomable Qui suis-je? (Who am I?), where the two musicians playing hide-and-seek ask, as two men as one, as two women as one, they pretend to ask themselves what cannot be answered and yet must be asked at all costs… Do they know that a sphinx had predicted their question, our question as we listen to them? André Breton: “Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I “haunt”. I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended.” If you pay close attention, this time and this time only, you will see and hear that these are certainly, uncertainly, the relations between Bernard Santacruz and Christine Wodrascka.
Alexandre Pierrepont
