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Guillaume Gargaud

Guillaume Gargaud (Born in France in 1979) is a composer and improvisational guitarist. He's already participated about twenty albums and composed many musics for contemporary dance and movies. He collaborates with musicians and plays "solo" in Europe and the United States. He lives in Le Havre in France where he also teaches music. 

"Guillaume Gargaud’s style of improvisational guitar and electronics is intriguing and absorbing; jumping back and fourth between harsh glitches and soothing soundscapes and visiting everything inbetween. Gargaud conjures up sounds like you’ve never heard before; combing a rich and full melodic Americana style of guitar playing with huge walls of fierce electronic noise and delicate droning, creating mammoth and highly varied textures. His music will lift you to enormous euphoric highs via twisted glacial landscapes and then leave you breathless in a black hole of psychedelia." --Dead pilot records UK

He started playing guitar when he was 15, after he was injured in a road accident and forced to stay home for a year.

In 1997, in addition to his cabinetmaking studies where he practiced sculpture, marquetry, restoration of antique furniture and art drawing, he worked on his instrument on his own and performed in different bands. In 1999, after passing his exams he decided to dedicate himself to music and he entered the professional course of IIMA lead by Laurent Rousseau. He then studied composition, musical analysis, jazz, contemporary and improvised music. During his studies he experimented with multiple forms of music (free jazz, bebop...).

In 2003 , he became a permanent member of the artist collective Zwann eï . He composes for performances, installations, sound poetry and movies. He realises visual creations and integrates laptop ( Ableton, Max msp) in his sound research system which was until then made of pedals, analog effects and objects. His implication in the collective will give him the opportunity to discover a new vision of writing and of the interactive relationships connected to picture, body and to literature.

In 2007 he decided to stop his tours to devote himself to his solo music and to get more involved into teaching by creating some improvised music workshops. Many trips, projects, live performances and recording will follow. Work with Loïs Laplace (Cycling 74), Federico Barabino (Buenos aires), Yumi Fujitani (danse butô, Paris), Les Conserveries mémorielles (Québec), Marc Roques (Zooloop, Paris), Sequana Deux (Contemporary Art from Le Havre to Paris "ABRUIT"), Jannick Schou (Denmark), Raphaël Maze and Francois Lebègue (“Light Cone " experimental cinema Paris), Nozal cube (Le Havre), The Future Ethnic Comparative Research Lab. (Paris), La cité de la musique (Paris), Jean Luc Petit,(FR) Sandrine Lascaux (Lecturer, Le Havre University), JP.Gomez, JP Buisson (Le Havre) M.Thouseau and V.Sauve (Paris), Blaise Merino (London), Mangane (Senegal), P.Sigmoon (Cambodia), Jack Wright (US), Raymond Alan Kaczynski, Mike Majkowski,(Berlin), Zachary Darrup (US) .

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