PERFORMANCE
SOLO

VALENTIN GOOSTMAN

Graduated from the Beaux Arts in Paris, Valentin Bonnet is a composer, singer, performer, and creator of various devices. His work revolves around music as a cultural object: how the context of its distribution and the technical means employed influence the evolution of its composition and production. In recent years, he has created his solo project Valentin Goostman, an electronic music work blending ambient, folk, scat singing, and experimental pop. He performs live using various methods and custom devices.

His practice includes compositions, concerts, actions, and shows, continuously situated within a specific context.

Since then, he has participated in numerous collaborative projects; with his electronic rock band Frederic Different, in musical performances with Sophie Torrell, in a musical forge setup (Mauvais Esprits) with blacksmith Aurélien Lafon, and many other endeavors.

"La traversée du désert de Jojo Le Pecquord"

"La traversée du désert de Jojo Le Pecquord" is a multidisciplinary project blending concert, performance, and theater. This performance portrays a character in his intimacy, attempting to quickly build a musical project and stumbling upon a series of tutorials on building a musical career from A to Z. He follows bits of one tutorial, then another, leading him to perform different actions: from vocal warm-ups, writing chords, DIY instrument making, lyrics, video production, various styles, building a persona, to live performance, culminating in a final product resulting from all the learning. Through the performance, the character's intimacy is revealed in his artistic and personal quest. He experiments as if no external gaze exists, losing himself in his intentions and identity to find himself. Often picturesque, these tutorials highlight the idea of learning music, its contours, and its dissemination via the internet today.

"How to Quickly Build a Musical Project Using the Internet? The intimate performance by Valentin Bonnet, aka Valentin Goostman, at the crossroads of music and computing, offers a hilarious and burlesque example, step by step. The objects are eclectic: a computer, a whiteboard, a bicycle, a clothes drying rack. All will be used. He gets instructions: 'How to build a musical project quickly,' he types into Google. On YouTube, tutorials and instructions pop up, Valentin Bonnet follows them, finds lyrics for a song about potatoes. Tense, he follows the instructions, seeks chords to accompany his verses. Before moving on to serious matters: 'develop your artist identity.' Deadpan, Valentin Bonnet searches, integrates, and applies these tips in this real-time musical choreography. A performance in which the artist (who also creates and produces music and musical devices) extrapolates what someone might do alone, strictly following these instructions, meticulously manipulating the artificial spectacle he creates before us: fake navigation, fake dramaturgy. Implicitly, having already produced an entire album in scat singing, he raises troubling questions about the democratization of music, solitude, and illusion. When does one become an artist? What legitimizes the act?"

Text by Marjorie Bertin about the first version of the performance.