At the centre of Bar & Dem & is BarDem, the long‑running duo of Vincent Barras and Jacques Demierre, whose practice takes sound, speech and language as raw material rather than transparent carriers of meaning. Their work begins with the projected voice - spoken, intoned, stuttered, layered, fractured - and with its placement in space. Language for them is not only syntax and semantics, but breath, grain, accent, rhythm, the physical gesture of speaking and the way it occupies a room. Over the years they have developed a multilingual, performed poetics where words are stretched, repeated, broken apart and reassembled, creating pieces that sit between sound poetry, experimental theatre and improvised music.
A defining feature of BarDem’s activity is their openness to collaboration. Rather than treating the duo as a closed system, Barras and Demierre repeatedly invite others into their orbit: performers, poets, sound artists, ensembles and collectives who share a concern with the materiality of language and with the act of speaking in public. These guests do not simply accompany the duo; they “question, hack, interpret, translate, echo and expand” BarDem’s work, subjecting it to their own methods and sensitivities. The result is a body of projects in which the original BarDem pieces are constantly refracted and re‑imagined, demonstrating how a single set of vocal practices can generate multiple, divergent sound worlds.
Bar & Dem & gathers a series of these previously unreleased collaborations into one box set, mapping the breadth of that extended practice. Some contributions come from composers who take the duo’s recordings or procedures as the basis for new works, re‑composing BarDem in their own idioms. Others feature performers who join Barras and Demierre on equal footing, adding their own oratorical strategies: spoken‑word tangles, micro‑timed interruptions, overlapping monologues that turn the piece into a polyphonic conversation. A striking example is the performance by The Alhambra Choir, in which a group of speakers from different linguistic communities enact a live translation of a BarDem poem. Languages cross and overlap in real time, making translation audible as a collective, provisional act rather than an invisible process.
Elsewhere, a quartet such as El Cuarteto de Buenos Aires interacts with the duo as a kind of vocal and performative counterpoint, multiplying lines and gestures until the stage becomes a dense web of responses. A sound engineer like Thierry Simonot contributes by designing specific playback and spatialisation setups, treating the diffusion system as another instrument that can reshape BarDem’s speech‑based structures. Authors and poets bring their own texts and reading styles into play, creating dialogues between BarDem’s multilingual poetics and other traditions of written and spoken experimentation.
Taken together, the pieces in Bar & Dem & show BarDem not as a fixed repertoire but as an evolving set of questions: What happens when language is treated as sound? How does a voice change when it is translated, amplified, displaced in space, doubled by other voices? How can collaboration itself become a way of thinking through the politics and pleasures of speaking together? By placing their duo at the centre of a network of responses, Barras and Demierre underscore that their work is less about a definitive statement than about ongoing, shared investigation. The box set stands as both archive and fresh proposition - a portrait of BarDem in dialogue with a wide community, and an invitation to hear language anew, as something both profoundly familiar and endlessly strange.
CD 1
The Alhambra Choir traduit BarDem • Speech Symphony Genève
CD 2
Kurt Gottschalk interroge BarDem • Live on WFMU’s Miniature
Minotaurs with Kurt Gottschalk May 4 2011
Adrien Kessler pirate BarDem • Sky Skyed
El Cuarteto de Buenos Aires interprète BarDem • Interpreting
BarDem Interpreting Buenos Aires
CD 3
BarDem invite Chris Mann • Corps étranger
CD 4
Jacques Demierre dilate BarDem • Èk’Nèye2/b(h)na
Thierry Simonot répercute BarDem • Cette phraène
CD 5
BarDem visite les avant-gardes • Vivat Cobbing Erb de Campos
Chopin Stewart Cage Gomringer Heidsieck Sanguineti rühm
de Campos Roth Mills & Mills Lax
