Free Frags is a platform of expression for visual artists who also practice sound. This project takes the form of an association under the law of 1901 which will serve as a support for the production and diffusion of the artists' projects: music, sound piece, poetry, parallel musical researches are welcomed and printed on one of the most apt supports to resist the passage of time: vinyl.

The aim of this artistic publishing label is to collect this sound material and give it a concrete physical existence. In addition to the making of a recording, Free Frags also makes it possible to implement a graphic work linked to the artist's practice: inserts, booklets, photographic prints, serigraphs... which will become one with the musical object.

The artist can therefore associate this particular form to his plastic art research. The principle of making vinyl, a reproducible engraving, gives to this object the status of a memory, which can be compiled and archived.

Free Frags aims to bring together these multifaceted artists, witnesses of a generation at the crossroads between the development of technology and the expansion of artistic practices towards hybrid forms.

On the other hand, the practice of sound opens the way to the experience of sound, whether it be during a listening session at home, in a concert hall or in an art gallery. These are all conditions that modify the perception of space, sound and objects.

Animal species with their own energies,
their own identities, without distinction,

only wild,
Indomitable.
Faced with them uncertainty.

A gaze from the depths, marked and striking,
on the verge of spasm.
A cry, a song, a pulse
ready to hit the membrane.

The bestiary of Free Frags

Each project is accompanied by the visual identity of the label, consisting of a wild animal chosen by the artist. Each entity joins the different protagonists to constitute a bestiary. Individuals operating in specific environments.

The iconography chosen is derived from an underground aesthetic of the 90s in the electronic music scene. A period when the arrival of sampling allowed multiple experiments and crossovers of musical genres, an opened door to a creation without limits.

The equivocal aspect that results from these portraits works on the uncertainty of our gaze in front of what we see: potentially dangerous, powerful, and free of their actions, these complex natures start the mechanism of our fantasies. It is these fantasies with instinctive origins that drive experimentation in other areas of creation, a new language to explore and tame.

Support for artists

Each edition is published in 300 copies, part of which is intended for the artist. The cover and back cover are occupied with the label's imagery. Free Frags also operates autonomously on its own ability to create visual and sound content outside of vinyl-edited projects.

The Gatefold format of the cover (vinyl book jacket) allows the artist to occupy the double inside page as he wishes. The sliders accommodate both the record and various graphic productions. Stapled booklets, photographs, prints and writings contribute to the complexity of the project the artist wishes to set up. The musical edition unfolds with its own singularity and accentuates its richness. More than just sound, each project is a bearer of meaning.

On the other hand, a part of the label is dedicated to collective projects, taking the form of a compilation edited under the same protocol. Notably collaborative projects between visual artists and musicians.

The audio processing, the pressing and the printing of the sleeve are carried out by French companies.

Free Frags was created by François Bianco, a sculptor born in 1985. François Bianco's passion for underground techno led him to develop a close relationship with vinyl records. Fervent supporter of this medium from a very young age through a relatively extreme musical genre, he has now been developing a practice of sound for more than twenty years. His beginnings in sculpture questions materials, their textures, the rhythms established by the forms as well as their perception in space.

This parallel between sculpture and sound led him to create a sound sculpture in 2018: Carbonari Figli, a mix of vertical shapes in vents with a sound piece diffused by it. Composed of various instruments such as the zampogna (bagpipe), double bass, cymbal... this sound piece is a sound trip through the landscapes of Calabria (southern Italy) where the carbonari (coalmen) perpetuate the survival of an ancestral skill that is doomed to disappear.

Approaching questions relating to memory and origins in this way, François Bianco has produced his own sound works on vinyl to archive this part of his work. After being confronted with the complexity of production required by the industry, he decided to create Free Frags, a platform dedicated to sound creation for visual artists.

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FREE FRAGS is honoured to present its first project by Steeve Bauras :

OHNE TITEL - STEEVE BAURAS

Click on the link below to listen OHNE TITEL !

https://soundcloud.com/user-179657080-570712477

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Ubi Dies Advenit/ And The Day Came

One may find in Aristotle (De Anima) that listening is but an invitation, always pending, to take into consideration what is happening as one is listening, proper, the noise of the rain, the chiming of some bell from Charlemagne Palestine or, simply, the tuning note played by the First Violin in an orchestra. With Steeve Bauras, it is like fords and sluices in the day to day humdrum of the world. Keyboards set sail for harmony land, and take on board a recurring drumming motif, hammered sheet metal with some taiko playing running underneath, stark riffs: re-sounding, really (spontaneous acoustics, that is; through voice and horn). If every room carefully establishes its own space, every sound reminisces, mentally and/ or acoustically, in the same way as Les Variations fantômes by Robert Schumann would, for instance. Keeping every picture at large and being so close to one at the same time, the sound works of Steeve Bauras use cangianti techniques: reflections in the mirror, oscillatory waves of some mantra which, by and by and accumulatively, eventually outsteps both sound or picture. The ever-changing (cangiante) is eventually brought to a halt in a relish of saturation and stridence, in support of the sound-pictorial palette. Pictures At An Exhibition.

Setting Up, with its dark clouds looming and electric showers, sounds like it is paving the [listener’s] way for some Dunkel Kind blowing a distant, but powerful French horn. The Intro sets a visionary mood from the start (some kind of introït for turbocharger, confirmed later by the angelicodemoniacal sample heard on What Are You ?) and one will remember, maybe, the trumpets of the Apocalypse, because of the persistent feeling of impending doom throughout the piece: "And the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound the trumpet. And the first angel sounded the trumpet: and there followed hail and fire, mingled with blood: and it was cast on the earth. And the third part of the earth was burnt up: and the third part of the trees was burnt up: and all green grass was burnt up." (the Apocalypse of St John, 8: 6-7). Cross is a crafty rearranging of different moods that bridges across desolation and complot_ and/ or repression. The sound recording that runs through J. Edgar Hoover has been altered, distorted, melted into acid acoustics to reveal, step by step, the American negative that is Hoover, through the sole magic of his name, and voice. Set against a backdrop of electronic martial music, a deafening loudspeaker noise is heard. Diving is closer indeed to some of Steeve Bauras’s other projects in video and sound-picture installations (3K), were it be not for its waltzed ending, repeated at once in Wp, which blends together the beat of rotating blades and a simple, sweet & melancholic rippling chord. If Horn would be, literally, the French horn, it is all preaching and prophesying, here. Both would announce the return, in whiffs of melodic smoke, of an impending doom. The ivory horn, left alone at the end, highlights and, as the rest of the tunes, seals the fate of an album, a funeral march that sets the music of Steeve Bauras in the orbit of the real and the premonitory frolicking over.

Jean-Baptiste Mognetti

translation : Rémy Louchart

Launch of FREE FRAGS: "OHNE TITEL" - STEEVE BAURAS

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