Photons (France)

Take four jazzmen with a passion for improvisation and techno clubbing and you get Photons, pianist Gauthier Toux’s new project, as much for dancing as for listening.

One night, the basses hit you in the gut, rattle your bones, creep up your spine, and unsettle your brains until they finally give in – that’s the sort of trance electronic music can produce. For Gauthier Toux, the revelation came one evening in 2016 at a club in Lausanne officiated by a techno DJ. A classically-trained pianist, then an adept of cerebral jazz, he was struck physically by the synthetic sounds and the pace of the machines, to the extent that the experience fractured the whole edifice he had built up as an academic instrumentalist. And that’s how the Photons project began. 

The Photons concert at TIFF.24 is made possible with the support of the French Institute in Cluj-Napoca and the Embassy of the Republic of France in Romania.