Heiner Goebbels:
The Mayfield

Friday, July 4, 2025, 9:30 pm, Festival Boat

Heiner Goebbels: piano
Camille Emaille: percussion
Gianni Gebbia: saxophones
Cecile Lartigeau: ondes martinot
Nicolas Perrin: guitar, electronics
Willi Bopp: sound design

“Mayfield is the name of an old train station depot in Manchester where we rehearsed and staged this performance “Everything That’s Happened And Would Happen”. Now a hip hotspot for the city, in 2018 it was still a cold, wet hall with long reverberations that were not only totally filthy with pigeons, all of which had a big influence on the aesthetics of the music that was created there. Apart from the Sicilian saxophonist Gianni Gebbia, whom I have known since the 90s, and Willi Bopp, with whom I have worked as a sound designer since 1989, I first looked for and found the musicians from The Mayfield for this performance: Camille Emaille, a fantastic, incredibly differentiated improvising drummer and percussionist; despite or perhaps because of her classical training, from which she has distanced herself.

Cecile Lartigau plays one of the very first electronic instruments, the Ondes Martenot, for which Olivier Messiaen, for example, composed. She is regarded as one of the few virtuoso soloists for this music in the world’s major concert halls. As an improviser, she brings out sounds from the instrument that have never been heard before.

Nicolas Perrin is not only a guitarist but also an instrument maker and has such a physical grip on the samples and field recordings on the electric guitar he developed that my own sampling in the 80s seems very poor in comparison.

We all work together on “electro-acoustic music”, in which the transformation of sounds and the classical attributions of instruments play a major role. Gianni Gebbia, for example, developed circular breathing – permanent breathing on the saxophone – more than thirty years ago. We are concerned both with the musicalisation of noise and, conversely, with not integrating technological developments into an existing musical concept, but rather accepting them as a challenge for a new common aesthetic: to be surprised.”

Excerpt from the Monheim Papers 2025, Thomas Venker.