Romain Azzaro & Jeanne Briand - Gear(s) (2024)

Friends for over two decades, French multi-disciplinary artist Jeanne Briand and French-Italian instrumentalist, composer and producer Romain Azzaro have evolved musically in tandem, sharing ideas and sounds that have bolstered their bond. So it was a natural development when Briand tapped Azzaro to help turn her elaborate glass gamete sculptures into hypnotic soundscapes on their 2016 debut Album ‘A Gamete Glass Tale’.

Azzaro, a guitarist, drummer and classical pianist who’s worked extensively on audiovisual projects, scoring movies and developing installations, and even teaming up with Karl Lagerfeld on a 2017 campaign for Chanel. His last album, 2021’s ‘Colours of Now’, released on his own Rouge Mécanique label, highlights his range as a producer, investigating the blurred lines between jazz, ambient, classical music and experimental sounds with a team of skilled cohorts.

Briand, a visual artist, trained at Paris’s prestigious Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and California Institute of The Arts, where she refined her artistic signature, using glass and hijacking mechanical parts and props. Exhibiting in galeries and across the world at places such as Miami’s NADA, La Panacée Arts Center in Montpellier, the South Dublin Arts Centre, Mumbai’s Clark House, MONO in Lisbon and Centro Textura in Bogotà, Briand has received a slew of awards and grants for her work, winning the Palais de Beaux-Arts’ New Technology Prize in 2016 and collaborating with prestigious houses such as Margiela Fragrences and Cartier.

Briand and Azzaro’s first album evolved from ideas Briand had formulated when she was experimenting with glass while developing an exhibition at CalArts in 2015. She wanted to turn her sculptures into sound generators or resonators, so the pair set about figuring out the exact sound of the glass. Piping Briand’s voice and various acoustic instruments through the curves and crevices, they slowly developed a musical language.

But one question has constantly haunted the two friends’ conversations: what might machine music sound like if it was made with glass? On ‘Gear(s)’, the duo tear up their own rulebook, again using Briand’s glass structures as a starting point, but heading further into the unknown and manipulating their palette of sounds until it straddles the biological and the mechanical. “Throw a glass onto the floor and it breaks,” Azzaro says. “The sound lasts forever.” This time, the music was composed to accompany an exhibition at Paris’s FTMA Festival, and motivated to challenge themselves, Briand and Azzaro decided to invert their initial concept, driving the glassy sounds through instruments and processes to distort their unmistakable sonic characteristics. Highlighting its brittleness and fragility, they shatter the glass’s serenity, turning the fragments into poetic, psychedelic electronic music. The glass is still there, but it’s been ground into glistening granules.

By demolishing their working method, Briand and Azzaro have figured out a process that truly emphasizes their concept. Gusty, glistening breaths help map out the shape of the sculptures themselves, and the duo work elusively, adding layers of distortion and discreet effects that turn the woodwind-like textures into crashing waves and subversive, electronically-enhanced zaps. Azzaro was careful to treat each recording with the utmost care, with the help of his friend Cesar Merveille and his modular machines, mastering every take separately before layering them like oil paint on a canvas and mastering everything once more. The result is a record that feels as if broken glass is being re-assembled electronically in real-time, pieced together with microscopic precision into an abstract, kaleidoscopic image. Shifting and morphing as the light changes, ‘Gear(s)’ is a sonic optical illusion that rewards deep, attentive listening.