Formed by five musicians, the French group Pancrace takes its name from the church where it took its first steps: the Saint-Pancrace church, in Alsace. They composed and improvised with and around the church organ, accompanied by a partly fabricated, diverted or modified instrumentarium (baroque violin, Irish flutes, drone boxes, calls, radios, piano frame, motorized bow, bagpipes, etc.). Following this experience, immortalized on a record released by Penultimate Press in 2017, Pancrace set about creating their own organ, specifically adapted to the band’s musical practices. The instrument, sprawling yet portable, both archaic and electronically controllable, now forms the heart of their sound. The result is a striking and mysterious music, with echoes of traditional, ancient and improvised music, as well as scholarly, electroacoustic and algorithmic experimentation. Invited by Ensemble Vide and Festival Archipel, the group will perform with its portable organ and vast instrumentarium, in conversation with the historic organs of the Saint-Gervais temple.

Jakob Ullmann, born in the GDR in 1958, is a discreet but essential composer of experimental and contemporary music of the last twenty years. His work, evocative and contemplative, revolves around long pieces for sounds played at low volume in resonant spaces, be they those of solo instruments or ensembles, or of voices. In this relationship with the limits of the audible, Ullmann pursues an intensification of listening. At the Saint-Gervais temple, Dafne Vicente-Sandoval will perform Müntzers stern, a composition for bassoon and pre-recorded voices, published in 2015 by Edition RZ. The piece was written especially for her.