Audrey Lauro (alto sax) & Michel Doneda (soprano and sopranino sax)

Two inspired musicians in solo and duo sets.

Audrey Lauro
With a wealth of experience in the Belgian experimental music scene, the French alto saxophonist, who lives in Brussels, has been devoting her energies to experimental music and improvisation for years, constantly questioning the language of the instrument, the phrase and the sound event. Following her motto "From phrase to sound event through all kinds of atoms and particles", AL. demonstrates a carefully considered use of sound vocabulary. For more than fifteen years she has been performing in various venues and festivals in Belgium and internationally, and collaborates with the Antwerp-based innovative production platform/ensemble for multidisciplinary music projects ChampdAction.www.audreylauro.comHer discography includes more than fifteen releases since 2008, in 2022 she recorded a solo album "Sous un ciel d'écailles" on the Gent label El Negocito Records, retracing a work for saxophone solo she started in 2011. A second solo album " prose métallique " will be released in autumn 2024 on the Relative Pitch Records label. She has recorded three albums in the last decade with the long-standing trio Lauroshilau, which also includes Pak Yan Lau and Yuko Oshima. She is also a member of the saxophone ensemble La Nuée and forms the duo Dark Ballads with guitarist Giotis Damianidis. She recently joined the Canopée Improvisation Music Ensemble (C-IME), an all-female, 8-piece improvisation ensemble formed out of a desire to experiment with the confluence of timbres, emptiness and fullness that silence brings. As an alto saxophonist, A.L. focuses on free improvised music and is also involved in multidisciplinary music projects. On 23 May she was invited by the Canadian ensemble GGRIL to create her piece "Ritournelle Reverse".
Since 2007, she has been conducting music workshops with teenagers and children and regularly works in secondary schools.

Michel Doneda(1954) is one of the leading figures on the improvised music scene, a soprano saxophonist in the tradition of Sydney Bechet, Steve Lacy and Evan Parker. An attentive traveller who listens to the world, he has been touring continents (from Africa to the USA and Japan) for over forty years, collaborating with a host of improvising musicians as well as painters, poets, dancers and experimental film-makers. Co-organiser, mainly in Toulouse, of several editions of ‘la marche de la poésie’ with the poet SEGE PEY, as well as ‘chantiers d'art provisoires’ and the ‘INFLUX’ festival. Numerous performances in gardens, forests and urban settings, often with dancers. He is currently a member of ‘la grande volière’, a project performed in trees by 6 soprano saxophonists and the audio naturalist Marc Namblard, and of the ensemble UN, which brings together 25 improvising artists. Since 2018 he has been active in Berlin, where he takes part in a number of mainly musical projects.

Michel Doneda is the author of the book ‘MIETTES 2’, published by MOMELUDIES, and of a ‘Carnet Vert’ published in the journal Les Ressources.

'Inventor of unheard-of musical proposals and syntaxes freed from the usual conventions and codes of use of his instrument. Michel Doneda reinvests the soprano saxophone with an interest in the infinitely small, at the heart of sound matter and texture, and the passionate exploration of a jungle teeming with micro-sounds, murmurs and elusive textures, a dreamlike universe (superbly compact) with regenerating virtues. ‘Solo concert at the Palais de Tokyo'.

Michel Doneda's music, from the highest manifestations of his instrumental playing, lets us hear his own skeleton crossed by the wind, the undulating movements of the air blending with the richness of all the matter that exists around us, of which we are a part, that he breathes, transforms and, in the end, lets circulate freely. Between him and us - in that elusive space he so aptly calls an itinerary of effacement. Lionel Marchetti.