PFL Traject is an improvisational trio from Lyon, France.
Pascal Pariaud: Clarinets and Pipes, Jean-Charles François: Percussion, Gilles Laval: Electric Guitar
PFL Traject can be described as an improvisation trio in the experimental tradition which do not rely on the written score, but elaborate music making directly through body actions, (corporeality to quote Harry Partch). For me, it is the continuation with a different context of the group KIVA (1975-1991) developed by the trombonist John Silber at UC San Diego, of which I was a member. Improvisation here is not a spontaneous activity, but rather the reenactment with always new perspectives of a predetermined sonic world. Each improvisation of PFL Traject is a voyage in the already constituted memory, a promenade in the garden of delights od what has already been cultivated. Each member brings his own repertoire of sounds, individual manner of proceeding, collections of instruments and heterogeneous objects, musical gestures exploring the multiple manners of making sound — blowing, strumming, beating and scraping…
Each one brings his touch. At the same time, in the unfolding of the improvisation, always different, what is at stake is not just the superimposition of three divergent universes, but on the contrary a concern for elaborating together collective sonic worlds, in some blending aggregates in which the ideal is not to be able to recognize the individual instruments, or in some heterogeneous mixtures which will be perceived as global entities. As such PFL Traject invites the audience to travel, to stroll, to ramble, to put oneself into orbit, to fly off at a tangent, to make the tour of a world that is well-defined in its individual windings, but is infinite in its collective combinations. At the same time a diversified trajectory of individualities, and trajectory in shared transports.
