Tip! ** 3 CD + 20 pages booklet in a DVD size box with texts (French / English) by Le Un, Joël Pagier, Jean-Philippe Pierron, Nate Wooley. ** 25 pièces sans vide presents Le Un in wide‑angle: three CDs that chart how this improvising society operates as a mutable organism across different scales and situations. Founded in 2012 at the initiative of double bassist David Chiesa and refocused in 2019 on what the group calls free or non‑idiomatic improvisation, Le Un now comprises 25 individuals, including a light artist and a performer. The box gathers large‑ensemble improvisations (CD1 & 2) in contrasting acoustics, small and medium‑sized formations (PME), and outdoor or site‑specific actions in public space under the banner of the brigade d’intervention légère. Taken together, these 25 pieces offer not a catalogue of styles but a sustained inquiry into improvisation as an attitude and an ethics.

At the heart of the project is a radical refusal of pre‑set scores or directions. For Le Un, improvisation is not a genre to be referenced but a way of making music together, grounded in listening, trust and a shared acceptance of risk. The group explicitly frames its practice around ephemerality and impermanence: the music leaves traces, not proof. Each performance is understood as a provisional configuration within a larger ecosystem, shaped as much by the room, the surrounding landscape or passers‑by as by the players’ choices. The three discs reflect this by shifting context: from theatres and concert halls to exhibition spaces, streets, rivers, caves and acousmatic setups with loudspeaker orchestras.

The ensemble’s internal organisation mirrors this openness. Le Un operates without hierarchy, encouraging each member to be as involved in social organisation as in artistic realisation. Ethical questions – links between people, relationships to environment, modes of self‑organisation – sit alongside aesthetic ones: how to assume responsibility for contradictions in one’s own practice; how to interrogate all the components of improvisation; how to question the “frontality” of performance. The group increasingly seeks situations that displace habitual roles: playing on a riverbank or in a cavern, inserting sound into urban circulation, devising “devices” that foreground improvisation itself rather than any single performer.

Musically, 25 pièces sans vide showcases the breadth of vocabularies these choices make possible. The large‑ensemble pieces can move from near‑silence to dense, teeming textures, winds and strings fanning out around electronic rustles, trumpet flares, rotating surfaces, light interventions and non‑verbal actions. Smaller constellations reveal more intimate negotiations of space and time, while the brigade d’intervention légère’s outdoor performances confront their sounds with the contingencies of traffic, weather and incidental audiences. Throughout, you hear not a fixed style but a collective willingness to let situations, bodies and instruments dictate form moment by moment.

The line‑up reads like a cross‑section of contemporary European experimental practice: Sophie Agnel (piano), Pascal Battus (rotating surfaces), Claire Bergerault (accordion, voice), Benjamin Bondonneau (clarinet), Christophe Cardoen (light apparatus), Patrick Charbonnier (trombone), David Chiesa (double bass), Michel Doneda (soprano saxophone), Camille Emaille (percussion), Nina Garcia (electric guitar), Amanda Gardone (double bass), Bertrand Gauguet (alto saxophone), Anouck Genthon (violin), Rozemarie Heggen (double bass), Benoit Kilian (percussion), Soizic Lebrat (cello), Lionel Marchetti (electronics), Michel Mathieu (actions), Natacha Muslera (voice), Jérôme Noetinger (electronics), Jean‑Luc Petit (bass clarinet, sopranino saxophone), Christian Pruvost (trumpet), Dominique Regef (hurdy‑gurdy), Aude Romary (cello) and Mathieu Werchowski (violin, viola). Each brings a distinct vocabulary; Le Un’s achievement lies in allowing those vocabularies to collide and cohabit without dissolving individuality.

As a whole, 25 pièces sans vide proposes the ensemble itself as an ecosystem, one where walking, breathing, feeling and looking are as central to the music as any note or noise. By venturing into contexts that “throw” them – streets, rivers, caves, acousmatic halls – the members confront their fragile, ephemeral discourses with the world’s own soundings. The box set documents that ongoing experiment: 25 pieces that refuse closure, yet collectively sketch a way of thinking about improvisation that is as much about how we organise ourselves and inhabit places as about the sounds we make.