Timothée Quost: a tool is a tool

The a tool is a tool project, commissioned by the festival, will see a meeting between a foreign experimentalist and the local scene around the prolific Ma Records. The French trumpeter Timothée Quost is one of those musicians for whom extended techniques are second nature; in particular, it is his inventive use of contact microphones placed on the instrument that allows him to create a layered sound which seems to come from just outside a listener’s ears, bordering on ASMR. At Alternativa, he will be accompanied by violinist Jana Havláková, guitarist and electronics player Kryštof Pátra, bassist Klára Pudláková and drummer Jakub Švejnar in a performance focusing on extreme amplification. Havláková, Pudláková and Švejnar are members of the ambitious project Uthando, which is characterised by a fluent, lyrical movement between composition and improvisation, but they also appear in numerous other, more or less stable configurations. Especially Švejnar's dynamic and oblique rhythms are already a constant in Prague's radical improv scene. In contrast, Pátra is closer to noise and abstract electronics, and his performances tend to be as energetic as this background suggests.