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WER069, May 2023

JACQUES DEMIERRE The Hills Shout CD & digital Jacques Demierre · Piano Shipping starts: May 6th, 2023 Release Concerts: May 6th 2023 at Moulin des Muses, 8 route de Sous-Moulin, 1225 Chêne-Bourg (Geneva) November 16th 2023 at Mullbau (Lucerne)

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Jacques Demierre, The Hills Shout

Jacques Demierre refers to his new album as a ‘live memory of a past concert’. It’s easy to understand how—through the process of developing the piece, presenting it in concert and then editing the recording into something rather new again—it could feel that way. But to someone outside his mind who has some familiarity with his stunning body of work, it can sound like a culmination, a realization of all of his imagination and innovation folded into itself. It’s a distinct and remarkable record.

In the opening passages of the single, 40-minute track, his piano comes off like a massaged, metallic harp. It doesn’t ramp up but quickly dissolves into a peaceful, almost Satie-like moment that turns to something like a drum solo, and then he’s back inside case. That’s just the first seven minutes. Demierre has made an album that seems to be built of blocks, like a wall with one brick made of feathers, another of ice, then next of origami. His brick motifs recur as he builds the wall, each distinct and recognizable, each foundational to the support of the structure.

Calling Demierre’s musicianship ‘extended technique’ is too easy. The pianist plays the fullness of his instrument, with precision in his explosions and subtlety in his minutiae.

Kurt Gottschalk


The Hills Shout is an edited version of a live piano solo concert given in January 2020 at Offene Ohren in Munich. I have been working on the recording during the 2020 lockdown. The resulting form is that of a rondo. As the act of remembering a sound is always a way to produce a new acoustic reality, The Hills Shout sounds like the live memory of a past concert. No new sound is added, but all the sound material that was once produced is being reconsidered through the immediate and present experience of my listening imagination.

Jacques Demierre

Jacques Demierre (photo by Peter Gannushkin)

Album Credits
Jacques Demierre, piano

1. The Hills Shout 39:46

Music performed and composed by Jacques Demierre, SUISA

Recorded live January 31st, 2020 by Hannes Schneider and Oliver Künzner at MUG im EinsteinKultur, Offene Ohren e.V., Munich
Mixed April 2021 by Adrien Kessler at Vélodrome Studio, Geneva
Mastered July 2022 by Blaise Favre at Vietnet Studio, Yverdon-les-bains

Photographs and graphic design by Alexandre Simon
Typography by Nicolas Perrin

The composition is named after a handwritten poem by Robert Lax (1980)

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