Mona Creisson
musician, improviser based in Geneva.
violin, viola, voice, composition, electronics.
Tentacular Improvisation, solo piece >2024
The solo is an improvisation of about thirty minutes, a navigation between different aesthetics and a search for symbiotic links between them. Conceptually, this improvisation is inspired by the readings of Donna Harraway and Sylvia Federici, and practically it is formed by a developed vocabulary of jazz experiences, electronic music, medieval and experimental improvisation.
Mona Creisson, viola, voice, FX, video
MERCALM >2024
MERCALM Duo is a peaceful and melancholic project inspired by the humid air of the ports in Bretagne, and the gliding flight of seabirds. (jazz, traditional and futuristic music, songs...)
Mona Creisson Viola, Irish bouzouki, vocals, FX
Benoît Gautier electric bass, FX
Killer Whales Music Theory>2022
Soul-jazz, this quartet plays his own composition as well as some from John et Alice Coltrane, Eddis Harris, Brigitte Fontaine, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, or encore Bobby Lapointe.
with:
Romane Chantre, drum, voice
Mona Creisson, violin,voice
Gregor Vidic, saxophones
Benoît Gautier, Contrebasse
photo by KillerWhalesMusicTheory
Random Grooves >2023
« One or more people who practice the drifting technique renounce, for a more or less long period of time, the reasons for moving and acting that they generally know, the relationships, the work and the enjoyable activities that are specific to them, to let themselves go to requests from the field and meetings that correspond to them. ". La Théorie de la Dérive, Guy Debord, 1964.
Dérive is a revolutionary technique to combat the boredom of the society of the spectacle. This piece is an experiment over our deterministic ways of playing, and the spectacle in music improvisation.
with ;
Anouk Neyens on Saxophone
Mikael Szafirowski, guitare
Stefano Grasso, Drums
Mona Creisson, voice, sampler
Solaris >2023
« The effects of light on a symmetriad are especially striking during the blue day and the red sunset. The planet appears to be giving birth to a twin that increases in volume from one moment to the next. The immense flaming globe has scarcely reached its maximum expansion above the ocean when it bursts at the summit and cracks vertically. » Solaris, Stanisław Lem.
Free improvisation, compositions, live sampling and experimental music, this project is a tribute to SF novels and to the pioneers of electronic music. An allegory of our own world and more specifically of our oceans though a futuristic aesthetic.
with:
Zoé Sjollema : voice, violin, spoken words and electronics.
Noé Franklé : drum
Florence Melnotte : piano, electronics
Mona Creisson : violin, voice, electronics, compositions.
photo by Chester Monroe
Apologia of the Useless>2024
This is an experiment on how to improvise repetitive music.
Repetitive music has something very alienating, to me it refers a lot to Koyaanisqatsi from Godfrey Reggio (music: Philipp Glass) and these images of endless supermarket products or crowds in escalators. It is like a journey were I would get lost in capitalistic production, and it becomes so alienating that I take perspective from it and think: what has capitalism opposed to necessary/useful production? Lie down in gardens, fail at cooking and playing music, fundamental research, picking berries during an entire afternoon, listening to my favorite story for a million times, think...
Luigi Serafini was nominated as a Professor of the University of Useless Sciences, and I am currently letting myself be influenced by useless practices, since I have the chance to do so. Sometimes it makes more sense to gather efforts for something I know capitalism won’t be interested in. And I am happy if this music sounds like this.
Sophie Oetinger, accordeon
Mikeal Szafirowski, guitare, fx
Natan Tricket, drums
Mona Creisson, viola, fx
SALOPERIE
This absurd, experimental and anti-commercial trio strikes since 2022 in Geneva and around.
It is composed with Yasmine Briki, casio, voice, tube, FX, Dombra, Romane Chantre, drums, voice, analog synthesizer, objects and Mona Creisson, violin, viola, voice, fx, live sampling.
photo by Kenza Wadimoff
Oloma 2021
Oloma is not a dish, it is not a brand for plastic cutlery, it is not the name for a endemic species of seaweed, it is not my nickname nor it is the name for a new disease, and it is not the name of a housing compagny.
It is not jazz, it is not rock either. It is fully improvised yet sometimes prepared, a bit. It is full of influences but it's mostly personal and circumstencial. It’s expression through a musical language that we invent and that we can’t write. And it is for listening.
Eloi Calame, bass clarinet
Mona Creisson, violin
photo prise par Mathieu Hurlimann
Improvising on Uranus
2021-2022
This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues. (...) It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.’
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’ Manifestly Haraway, 68.
Improvising on Uranus is a joyful and chaotic weaving of poems, cracks and squeaks, chopped up essays and broken melodies. The project arose from a shared and deep-felt urge to bring a new sense to improvisation: we want to bring our music and our audience in touch with the existential and philosophical questions that drive it and that drive us. We play with feminism, tulips, trans-humanism, cyborgs, vulnerability, the aliens within ourselves. We do not want to keep philosophy to the philosophers, or experimental music to musicians: we want to share, cross-pollinate, explore the one through the other. While the texts shed new light on the music, the music brings life to the text, and allows it to exist in a performative space, by translating it into direct sensations, sounds, rhythms, spheres. In an intricate, free weave, the texts that inspire us do not only start a conversation with the music, the musicians and the audience, but also start speaking to each other: Will Allen Ginsberg’s bottle rocket land on Uranus, guided by the voice of Paul B. Preciado from deep down below? And what will the cyborgs talk about when they meet with Kafka’s monkey and Preciado’s monster over a coffee, a fresh bouquet of Bobin’s tulips on the table?
The group consists of:
Franka Bauwens (NL) on words;
Amsterdam based performer, hugely interested in everything involving language, has a master in philosophy at the UvA.
Georgia Wartel Collins (SE) on double bass;
NYC based jazz musician who studied at the Conservatory of Trondheim (Norway) and did a master at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.
Mona Creisson (FR) on violin
Studied jazz violin at the AMR jazz club of Geneva and the Conservatory of Amsterdam, currently based in Geneva.
Appears on:
W O R D S (track5) (2023) is a project of the trombone player Matteo Paggi of "inspired improvisation", which aims to destroy the barriers of all musical genres and let every musician express themselves as purely and intimately as possible."
Tier Des Jahres
"Tier des Jahres is a journey of sharing memories linked to specific organic materials: branches, water, gravel and leaves.
We spent part of the winter between moments of silence, stories, individual stories and stories of the communities of which we come from.
Individual stories began to become part of the collective memory and vice versa. A river began to flow on the border between our memories (physical, psychological, emotional) and huts and houses on stilts began to grow on its banks, signs of civilization and semi-organized communication between bodies. "
Stefano Grasso
