Toma Gouband ^(FR)

'You don't even have to "enter" Toma Gouband's music: our ears (and eyes, when we have the pleasure of seeing him at work) are naturally invited by the spectacular and unheard-of arrangements of tonal colors that make up his dreamy and inventive universe: flints, natural skins of a horizontal bass drum sprinkled with little bells or blocks of wood, branches and twigs, stones rolled on the ground, inverted cymbals thus collecting all sorts of natural resonators... the hi-hat cymbals have been replaced by... stones, too...

Animated by an inner pulse made of superpositions of mysterious cycles, like so many clocks telling the time of life at poly-speed, which overlap or collide, Toma Gouband's music transcends the idea of an imaginary territory, because it invites us to approach it like a social rite or even a loving ceremony', writes Benoit Delbecq.

​Gouband is a master of the lithophone, using the range of stones from the struck rocks, plus other percussive sounds, to create rich pieces that never opts for straightforward rhythms but instead features complex polyrhythms that are very gentle on the ear. At times, the sounds could easily be mistaken for a field recording of a natural phenomenon such as water dripping in an underground cavern or of a human activity such as miners at work.