Double Us

Description

L’ultima cena (The Last Supper) is almost cinematic: the piece seems to transport us there, to Mount Zion, amid evocation and remembrance in the land of Jerusalem. The depth of Bosco (The Wood) is fully present in the piece of the same name, with its electronic teeming, its echoes, and its long notes disappearing into the distance. And Città sottili (Thin Cities)? One seems almost to see them “painted”: traced by strokes of the bow, drawn with elegance and precision.

Double Us, the new album by violinist and composer Eloisa Manera, whose roots are partly Spanish, is a journey through the most varied sonorities that may be forged from the instrument, including — indeed especially — beyond the boundaries of the classical domain. After a rigorous academic training and formative experiences in the United States, Manera set sail as a true explorer of the musical world; and she has remained one ever since, without compromise, while preserving an immediate and genuine capacity to communicate with her listener.

Here too, between Western twentieth-century echoes and sonorities drawn from other cultures, the composer confirms her instinctive refusal to settle for the obvious or for musical cliché, offering instead her own genuinely contemporary voice. This is not a case of postmodernism. If anything, one might speak — borrowing a more recent critical vocabulary — of a form of “hypermodernity”: hers is an authentically twenty-first-century music, one that appears as a continuation of earlier history, but in a state of expanded variety. Alongside estranging climates of eroded classical tonality, for instance, African-American impulses also emerge.

To this is added a quality that belongs uniquely to the artist herself: an inward reflection on what art may be today, and the desire to tell stories through the power of sound and of the images it awakens. Music and vision, then — one of the signatures of our time — are shaped, offered and placed before us in the pieces of this album by Eloisa Manera, a musician who has now reached a first, assured artistic maturity, with grace, imagination and remarkable originality.

Eloisa’s journey continues…

Luca Pavanel

This album is conceived around a constellation of ideas: mirroring, generativity, multiplication, dialogue, fecundity, and overflow. These arise from a small act of doubling — a kind of musical mitosis born of friendship — and from the desire to allow that process to assume a form. The title takes its cue from Kenny Wheeler’s celebrated album Double, Double You.

The wish to bring a shared project into being had long been in the air with Zach Brock, the distinguished American colleague whom I first met in New York in the summer of 2011. Since then, a friendship has grown, sustained by mutual esteem and by a continuous exchange of musical stimuli; and from that soil, the desire to play together gradually germinated.

In the summer of 2025 we were finally able to organise a studio session. I wanted to explore a project that would expand the idea of mirroring, while pushing our shared violinistic identity towards its outer limits of scale and register. The choice was therefore to double this doubling through the involvement of two double basses, moving towards a hyperbolic, slightly distorting — and itself somewhat distorted — string quartet, as though viewed through a lens borrowed from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The impulse to move towards something that overflows, and that enters into dialogue with alterity as well as with what is near-yet-distant, seeks to resist that “hell of sameness” of which Byung-Chul Han speaks. It also seeks to collide with the concept of minimalism, turning instead towards a form of delicate maximalism — assuming, of course, that such an adjective may legitimately be applied to this approach at all. The point is not to reduce, but to enlarge, even within a deliberately circumscribed environment.

In this album we encounter acoustic sounds, composed pieces, and improvised pieces. Electronic spices lend a psychedelic charge to a poetics poised between the roots of the ancient trees from which acoustic instruments are made and the “alchemical” transmutation enacted by electronic devices. Through conductive metals, these devices make possible the manipulation of signal components from the domain of time to that of frequency, and back again.

I imagined this quartet as a kind of timbral laboratory: a multicellular organism to which several of my pieces originally written for other formations could be offered as matter for transformation, in order to discover what might emerge from this strange musical apparatus. It functions as a transducer of pre-existing compositions, recomposing them within a new sonic configuration.

I was especially curious to realise works originally written for septet, duo, trio, and solo settings, rearranging them specifically for Double Us and either expanding or compressing the writing.

The broader challenge posed by these chamber forces lay in the absence of instruments with a specifically harmonic function and, above all, of instruments with a specifically rhythmic one. The absence of harmonic instruments was not, in truth, a problem to be “solved”: by superimposing even two notes, by placing two pitched sounds in relation to one another, one naturally creates a form of counterpoint, and therefore of harmony. In certain cases, however, I felt the need to create a sonic stratum with a more explicitly pulsating function; to achieve this, I used the double bassists as fearless percussionists of the large resonating bodies of their instruments.

There are also new pieces that are entirely improvised. I wanted there to be windows of freedom opened onto the unexpected: tabulae rasae, blank pages to be painted together. These are the pieces whose titles ask questions, thereby underlining their intrinsically improvisatory nature — a nature grounded in doubt and uncertainty, and one that marks the path of becoming and of inquiry as it unfolds.

Those questions revolve around what constitutes “little” and “much”: is it better to remain, and to work by subtraction, or to act through expansion? Is it more desirable to remove, or to add?

In a certain sense, this project may be understood as an act of post-production, in Nicolas Bourriaud’s sense, or perhaps of re-production: a way of dwelling with what already exists and reinventing it together, dialogically and creatively. It places its trust in a small yet overflowing “us”, activating strategies of creative sustainability and recycling.

The word “Double” also recalls the double bass, while “us” resonates, obliquely, with the slang expression badass: tough, fearless, intrepid. In this way, the title also discreetly hints at certain features of the ensemble itself: a courageous and daring quartet of musicians, ready to explore older pieces by giving them new light and new sonorities, and to create from nothing previously unheard landscapes — without a safety net and without prejudice, yet with the awareness that they can rely on the listening, openness, and artistry of colleagues prepared for a constructive and regenerative interplay.