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. It takes the form of a wandering between vocabulary of jazz experiences, electronic music, medieval and experimental improvisation.
Mona Creisson, viola, voice, FX, video
MERCALM >2024
MERCALM is a sweet and melancholic project, born from the Breton drizzle and the soaring flight of seabirds. Somewhere between jazz, traditional or futuristic music, a few electronic touches and songs gleaned on the coasts, the music is intimate, carried by memories of travels, past storms and the stories of seafarers.
Mona Creisson Viola, Irish bouzouki, vocals, FX
Benoît Gautier electric bass, FX
Killer Whales Music Theory>from 2022
Les histoires que conte Killer Whales Music Theory puisent leurs source de légendes anciennes, de rages révolutionnaires, des abysses, et des folies de notre monde.
Elles portent en elles les reflets de la mer et la complexité du vivant.
Les musicien.ne.x improvisent sur un répertoire en hommage au début du free jazz et à toutes les musiques qui par leurs libertés ont porté les histoires et les luttes de leurs temps.
Le groupe jouera au Swiss Diagonal Jazz 2026.
Avec : Chloé Marsigny, clarinette basse
Stefano Grasso, batterie
Mona Creisson, alto, chant
Benoît Gautier, contrebasse
Anciens membres :
Romane Chantre, batterie, chant
Gregor Vidic, saxophones
photo by Reto Andreoli
Planté là >2024
Théâtre play, work in progress
by Un Pied dans la Flaque company
On stage, a young musician watches over a man, jester of the village, lost in his memories. Time and the absence of a family member have eroded their bond.
Both replay the past like a search in an attic, a story that endlessly rewrites itself, without finding a way out.
In their unconventional lives, poetry grows from concrete and drinks to this surprising fate.
So, in a last attempt before the fall, they begin an escape.
Through the tender and harsh writing, a picture emerges of a contrasting rurality in which a family struggles to find a place. It deals with marginality, loneliness, and a sense of belonging.
While the writing of the text is intimate and at the basis of the spectacle, it was born from a need to give voice to and compose with underrepresented places and characters.
They tell us that there are no small stories and invite us to take a naive look at the world. Without pretense and without varnish, without making misery shine.
They express themselves in a colorful performance composed of music, theater, and dance, like different languages working toward a common landscape.
Pao Schachner, texte et mise en scène
avec David Martin et Mona Creisson
Confusion Vessel >from 2023
develops deconcentration.
Players engage in random ballads between grooves, textures, styles and tones. Players can draw inspiration from political theories, natural phenomena and chaos theory. Movements are carried out in improbable ways, and players can get lost in different dimensions of reality.
The project was born in December 2023 in Basel, it started out as an experiment inspired by Guy Debord's drifting theory and Society of the Spectacle. From this first experiment, the four musicians have developed their music inspired by different phenomenons, such as the movements of the waves, children's songs, and their own musical backgrounds (new music, improvised music, underground experimental, jazz and traditional).
The band is releasing there debut album Live at AMR in December 2026 with the independent label Subject To Change.
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 stroked from 2022 to 2024 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 2021-2022
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
