Artist & composer Allan Gilbert Balon was born in Les Abymes, Guadeloupe in 1986 and is now based in Créteil, in the Southeastern suburbs of Paris. Allan’s practice combines sculpture, composition & sound installations to explore themes of presence & intimacy.

Allan is the co-founder of **xyä édition©** with Uta Guan Hyë, has released music on Recital Program & Séance Centre and exhibited at New York’s MoMA PS1.

Allan’s debut album, The Magnesia Suite, begins with a submerged choral voice that reverberates closely amongst long held organ chords introducing a lo-fi patchwork waltz of home recorded pieces drawing together piano, reeds, percussion & echoed voices. An assemblage of private histories and memory, flowing lucidly in a coastal drift of dissolving lines between the outside environment and internal space.

An intimate air hangs over Allan’s craft. Private music that evokes something of Erik Satie’s furniture music. A sense of the overheard, slowed down ragtime piano rolls drifting from a parlour window; spliced tape & late night radio FM interference. Allan gives us an architecture of sound that recalls the spatial tensions of dissonance and warmth held in the piano chords of Thelonious Monk and minimalist reverence of Charlemagne Palestine & Alvin Curran with the unhurried, wandering poise of the piano works of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou.

Quiet notes that bring to mind the late composer Talib Rasul Hakim’s reflections to accompany one of his own pieces as “atmospheres-of-sound floating above and around segments of moving silence”.