Guillaume Gargaud

Guillaume Gargaud is a French composer and improvisational guitarist. He has played on some twenty-nine albums, and has composed a substantial body of music for contemporary dance and cinema. He has collaborated with Stephen Grew (UK); Conserveries Mémorielles (Quebec); Burton Greene, Marc Edwards, Ben Bennett, and Jack Wright (US); Korvat Auki Ensemble (Finland); and many more. He performs solo in Europe, and in the United States and Canada. He lives in Le Havre in France, where he also teaches improvised music. He has played recently at Mixtur Festival (Barcelona) Colchester Arts Center (UK) WIM (Zürich) CreativeFest (Lisboa) Overtoom 301 (Amsterdam) Elastic Festival (Oxford) Skolska 28 (Prague) Quiet Violence Festival (Berlin) Kaunas in art Festival (Lithuania) The house art (Ostrava) Oslo10 (Basel) MuMa Art Center (France) USA & Canada Tour Huset-KBH (Copenhagen) MOZG (Warsaw) AZILO (Naples) Art Center MadXII (Latina) Interpenetration (Graz) kunstbetrieb (Vienna) Offene Ohren MUG (Munich) Festival M.I.C Circo Ru (Locarno) Noise Delivery Festival (Turin) Forum Box (Helsinki) (…)

Reviews
"..we discover a guitarist who plays the acoustic wonderfully, working to crystallise the moods conjured by the techniques being used: atonality, complex melodic lines and, in the tradition of the contemporary guitarist, fast runs around the fingerboard, a search for counterpoint, dramatically placed glissandi, an exploration of sounds at the bridge, etc. Strange Memories is part of that category of works that marvellously exploit the technical and emotional characteristics of the instrument"
Review of the album Strange Memories by Ettore Garzia for Percorsi Musicali

"To describe Gargaud as some sort of “incredible one-man string band” is no exaggeration. Albeit that he ignores explicit references to well-defined styles and any narcissistic riff. In short, a "guitar pendulum" in the best improvisation tradition. Especially for fans of Dirk Serries."
Review by Georges Tonla Briquet For Jazz'Halo

(...) In fact, "Here" is a goddamn rock, a reference-point, but with sparkly highlights, markers pointing out away ahead. "Here" is your tying together of several cosmic threads of music history: combine Fennesz- slash-Hecker-school guitar+electronic sonics, the deep-space electronica of Biosphere, the European Free Improv tradition of Derek Bailey's guitar-playing, and the propulsive benzodiazepine blur of über-minimal dubtechno wizard-like Basic Channel or Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, the seminal tonal tape+guitar forays of Fripp & Eno, somehow... and it starts to look more like a rare-earth element that turned up for the first time last week in the guts of a meteorite. (...)
Foxy digitalis writing by Stephen Clove from New Zealand.

(...) Guillaume Gargaud has created an essential piece of music for the electronic avantgarde, a masterwork that ranks alongside Fennesz’s Black Sea in regards to its sophistication, attention to detail, influence and brilliance. While being an electronic record, it also stands as a beautiful solo guitar record, recalling elements of Steffen Basho Junghans or Nick Drake (...)
Groovenime reviewed by Neil Levens