Nicolas
The BAND - Guitares Cinématiques
Guitares Cinématiques is a unique blend of classical guitar, MIDI guitar, vocals, and sfx. The name of the band signifies the connection between the guitar-based style of music and the visual imagery of film that the music implies.
I grew up surrounded by classical guitar. I loved the tone of the instrument but I always wanted to create a different kind of music... My classical guitar is configured to play MIDI (i.e synthesizer instruments) just like a keyboard. My current focus is on electromagnetism in astrophysics, particularly on the Sun-Earth interaction in terms of the health effects of solar coronal magnetic ejections (CMEs) on Earth and during spaceflight and as well on what happened to the oceans and magnetic dynamo of Mars.
Influences and Favorites
My chief musical influences were my guitar teachers Ralph Towner and Steve Cardenas. My favorite groups are Oregon, Weather Report, Popol Vuh, Splashdown, and The Seatbelts. My favorite classical composer is Chopin but I also like very much the Hungarian composers (especially Bartók & Kodály,). I love listening to rebroadcasts of old time radio dramas! Naturally, I'm a huge fan of my teacher Ralph Towner (of course!) but I also love the music of guitarist/composers Baden Powell and Egberto Gismonti, and especially the music of composer Yoko Kanno (her extremely varied compositions for the anime TV series Cowboy Bebop with her band The Seatbelts plus her soundtrack of the anime "Ghost in the Shell -Stand Alone Complex"), Joe Hisaishi (all of his soundtracks for the classic Miyazaki anime films "Laputa: Castle in the Sky", 'Spirited Away", "Princess Mononoke", Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind", "Howl's Moving Castle"), Rokia Traore (I love her CD "Bowmboi") and all the recordings of Chet Baker! I'm a mega-fan of singer Eva Cassidy!!!
The CD
"Penguins on Mars" is the debut CD by Guitares Cinématiques. This project started as a film but became a music CD, at least for the moment... So, really the CD is meant to represent what it would feel like to watch the film... the film inside my head. I tried very hard to make each piece on the CD take you to a different place..
This CD is collection of 11 original pieces of music. The idea is that the CD fully replaces the film. Half of the tracks are instrumental.. The other half are more in the style of old radio dramas but conjuring up a modern film-like feeling. The CD combines classical guitar played both acoustically and electronically with voice, flugelhorn, cello, and sfx's to create extremely detailed visual music around the themes of Mars, the migration of the Polynesians from Peru, space flight, magnetic field reversals, and solar coronal mass ejections. (click on "Links" portion of this website for background info on these topics!)
Except for the flugelhorn and cello parts everything is played by means of my guitar. All of the percusssion instruments (cymbals, high hat, kettledrums, tambourine, and xylophone) and some of the horns (trombone, french horn, and tuba) are played using the classical guitar to trigger software synthesizers via MIDI.
The tempos are sometimes 11/8, 7/8, 10/8, 5/8 or a combination of different tempos playing at the same time. Just a few pieces have 4/4 but mostly the melody is highly syncopated so it's hard to feel it's 4/4. That's intentional. I don't want to feel 4/4 !
My wish is that you find the music to be fresh and captivating... and that when you close your eyes and listen carefully, you'll begin to see my film.
For samples of the music, see the "Listen" section or visit us on www.last.fm
GUITARES CINÉMATIQUES is:
Nicolas - classical guitar, MIDI guitar (as horns, drums, percussion, electric guitar, and miscellaneous sfx's), cello, djembe, voiceovers (Japanese and English), field recordings of trains, cicadas, ocean waves
THE GUEST ARTISTS (also see my "Links" section)
Xavier Horcholle - synthesizers
Shanna Gilfix - vocals
Steve Stanley - flugelhorn
The GUITAR
The guitar is a cutaway classical guitar with MIDI designed by Dr. Michael Kasha, and built by Richard Schneider, Jay Hargreaves, and George Majkowski (reviewed in Acoustic Guitar Magazine Jan 2004 article "Great Acoustics")