“Urs Graf Consort, a collective with a corrupted genealogy, produce trail-blazing simulacra - songs nested within themselves, with the experimental accents of Ursonate. A protean duo operates under the name of Swiss engraver Urs Graf (1485 - c. 1529); Prune Bécheau and Adrien Bardi-Bienenstock are composers and performers for ensembles that are as varied as the motley company brought together in The Peasants War which Urs Graf depicted; Uva Ursi captures on-the-spot at acoustic vigils on the edge of amplified battlefields.
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"There are songs on here, but only in so far as Trout Mask Replica is a record of songs. It is odd and compelling and brilliant, a record that opens a rabbit hole and I have barely scratched the surface of what it is about. So far it seems to be about the past, but without putting any of that material in a historical or imitative encounter, working in opposition to conceptions of traditional repertoire in performance and concept. There is harpsichord and grouped voices, often singing in untrained chanted songs – in Italian, French, Spanish and Danish.
While listening I took my headphones off for a moment, leaving a harpsichord and female voices. When I returned a minute later it had become something that sounded like a ping-pong game with a bullfrog for an umpire." - Jennifer Lucy Allen, The Quietus
Urs Graf Consort, a collective with a corrupted genealogy, produces simulacra, songs nested within themselves, with the experimental accents of Ursonate. Prune Bécheau and Adrien Bardi-Bienenstock are composers and performers for ensembles that are as varied as the motley company brought together in etchings by the Swiss engraver Urs Graf. The song, an object, is essayist, narrative, dramatic, and serves like a space to wander, a waterway whose banks meet only at its source and nevertheless form a whole, subtly fragmented, off-the-cuff punctuations that have no other purpose than to accentuate the fluidity of the whole in the play of obstacles; splashing, sinking, diving, shouting, while the pulsing of the commas continues to respond to the luminous undulation of the surface when, with a communal shiver, the buttocks disappear beneath the cool water.
