By Stuart Broomer
Sophie Agnel has released a bevy of brilliant releases in recent years,
including the solo CD Song (Relative Pitch, 2025); two duos with John
Butcher, la pierre tachée (Ni Vu Ni Connu, 2022) and Rare (Victo, 2025); the
exploratory quartet recording Quartet un peu Tendre with saxophonist Daunik
Lazro and the electronic duo of “Kristoff K. Roll” (Fou Records, 2024); a
luminous duet, Draw Bridge, with percussionist Michael Zerang (Relative
Pitch, 2024); and the brilliant archival LP Gargorium, recorded in 2008/2009
by a trio with Lazro and guitarist Olivier Benoit (Fou, 2023).
Learning further extends that body of work. It is Agnel’s first solo
recording to be released on LP, each side devoted to a single improvisation,
but with a certain symmetry. Side A was recorded on June 6, 2023 and runs
18:42; Side B was recorded on June 4, 2024 and runs 18:47, each from an
event at Café Oto. It’s stunning playing, each side a work of continuous
evolution in which Agnel mines the piano’s every resource, whether adding
materials to the strings, plucking the interior, or producing thunderous
explosions at the keyboard. That title Learning might refer to the voyage of
discovery undertaken at the piano’s multiple continents, its exterior,
Interior and combinations thereof, its compound identity an embodiment of
her deeply traditioned and yet infinitely extensible and divisible art.
There’s an insistence here on the significance of the piano’s whole and
original name, pianoforte, the instrument as soft and loud, as sweet and
harsh as it might ever be, evident throughout ‘Learning A,’ whether its
factory-strength, brutalist machine sounds from prepared bass register,
subtle glissandi whispering on upper register strings, or voice-like
murmurings drawn on the middle register. One feels the whole of the piano’s
varied (and potential) resources. In one extended quiet passage there’s a
mix of keyboard articulations and violin-like sustained notes from the
strings themselves, likely owing to an e-bow. Another quiet passage has
consonant clusters oscillating in the upper register.
‘Learning B’ is more of the same and yet utterly different, another deep dive
into the instrument’s resources, bass clusters roaring against insistently
sweet middle-register tremolos, the quiet twittering of birds, saw-like
carpentry noises and even sounds that can only be described as the flotsam
and jetsam, lagan and derelict, that is, the varied categories of debris of
the piano’s oceanic potential. There are instances of the piano’s mystery
and sweetness, hitherto undreamt of, yet arising here, coming into audition.
There’s a lovely drone passage that might be achieved with two e-bows, a
middle register drone and a high one. The piece ends in a beautiful
assortment of little sounds, whispering, tinkling, drawing out to silence.
This is special music, all of it profound, open, glowing, generous,
empathetic, reaching.