Shared Memory
Benoit Cancoin and Ulrich Phillipp have been sharing memories since 2005, where they performed as a double bass acoustic duo at the "festival Courant d'Art" - staged by the French Collectif Ishtar. From the start they were interested in the way how the free flow of sounds is or can be structured by memory: The linear flow of new material gets a circular layer by comments, reactions or repetitions of this material.
This concept of balancing creation and memory – developed during the last ten years - now appears in a new disguise. In the Uliben Duo, Benoit Cancoin is still playing the acoustic double bass while Ulrich Phillipp gives electronic treatment to his sounds. Which however does not imply that the bass stands for creation while the electronic treatment represents memory, even if the digital instrument obviously makes specific use of the memory function.
In each of the four tracks on this CD, you can hear how both instruments work with new as well as „used“ material, both players create and use their (short- or longterm) memory. They both share the mutual process of producing ideas and reacting to the given material. Creation and treatment of sounds become one and the same in the concept of Shared Memory.
There is another aspect, which gives to this project its strength and its particular nature: In the Uliben Duo the electronic treatment is done by a double bass player, which means he knows very well the instrumental sounds he is going to work with. And from a long history of shared playing he also knows the musician who produce these sounds.
Gerhard Westerath

reviews:

AMN Reviews

Memory has fascinated humans for as long as there have been humans. With their CD Shared Memory the Uliben Duo take this fascination and from it make a metaphor in sound for memory and its sometimes surprising mutability.
The Uliben Duo is French double bassist Benoit Cancoin and German sound artist Ulrich Phillipp, who here contributes live interactive electronics. The two began collaborating about ten years ago as a double bass duo. For this recording Cancoin remains on double bass but Phillipp moves to electronics—seemingly a radical departure, but his experience as a double bassist provides a continuity of sensibility and grounds his choices vis-à-vis Cancoin’s playing throughout the recording.
The four tracks presented here seem to take the relationship between sounds within the flow of time as somehow paralleling the relationship of images in short-term and long-term memory. Cancoin and Phillipp’s sonic image of memory isn’t as a passive archive storing the frozen images of past events but instead is a plastic faculty whose contents are subject to change. Concretely this comes out in Phillipp’s capture and reworking of Cancoin’s tapped, plucked, bowed, strummed and hammered sounds. These sounds undergo timbral mutation, fragmentation, reversal and repetition; figures are switched around and put in places they never originally occupied, appearing and reappearing in different guises. Phillipp wrenches real-time acoustic sounds out of their original contexts in order to create new contexts for them and of them, while Cancoin actively improvises against and reinterprets these electronic recollections of his now-past playing. As within his performances with the exquisite Quatuor BRAC, Cancoin’s presence here is one of uncluttered concrete materiality, while Phillipp’s part is to provide the organic force shaping the duo’s overall, essentially unitary sound.
Daniel Barbiero