No End (2025)

Sophie Agnel: No End Text by Jennifer Lucy Allan

In the opening of Sam Williams's film, No End, I see red boots against black curtain, a woman sits down, stands up, reaches over the keys and into the body of the piano.

As it is so often noted, pianist Sophie Agnel often plays standing up, better to play the whole of a piano's material presence. Williams shows her extending her hands into its guts like a butcher; like a surgeon, giving the ivory voice bones and flesh, collapsing the hegemony of the keys into something other; something new. Notes played trigger grunts and snarls; ghosts and shadows; new utterances for this beast of an instrument; a new beauty revealed in the piano.

Sophie Agnel was born in 1964 and began playing the piano as a child. She was classically trained and later moved into jazz. She tells us, while we see her making coffee at home, that she had a perfect pitch and an acutely-trained ear, and describes how, reading a score by Schubert under the hum of electric light one day, she found her internal ear silenced. It changed her way of listening, opened her ears to the wider world of sounds around us – the ones we filter out as much as those we listen to. She became more interested in the sound than the song, articulated her playing out of jazz into free improvisation. "I sought to play the whole piano without really being aware of it, without a boundary between the frame and the keyboard.” she once told the Morning Star.

What Agnel plays is not contained by the term prepared piano, as most might call it, but is better encompassed by thinking of her technique as that which extends the piano. Extended by what? By technique; by objects, by her body; by her ear; by what we know the piano to be. She both undermines and plays with its historical baggage; with the mass of expectations and convention around its form. Agnel extends the way we presume it will be played; the way we are used to it being treated. She does not look to strip out its identity completely. The instrument remains a piano, but one rediscovered each time she loads the strings. "If I don't find new things, if I don't take risks, there's no music," she says.

Objects she uses inside the piano have included: rubber inner tubes, sardine tins, plastic cups, foil ashtrays, bouncing plastic balls, marble balls, small bells. The strings are activated by guitar picks, e-bows; tingsha bells; beaters, a pink plastic hairbrush, and they are muted by Blu-tack. Time is elastic: Set times are set times, sure, but there is always more time in the tank if you want it, until the body needs sleep or food.

What gets mentioned in write ups of her playing is a breaking of boundaries, in the moment of playing but also in who she plays with. She plays across genres, most often in improvised music and free jazz – in In Aqisseq with bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble, but also with Swiss turntablist and noise maker Joke Lanz; with choreographer Josef Nadj. She has released on Relative Pitch, OtoRoku, Another Timbre, and others, and played with Daunik Lazro, Catherine Jauniaux, John Butcher, Michael Vatcher, Phil Minton , Michael Zerang. She has composed for theatre, films by Philippe DeJonckherre and Stephane Rizzi, and contributed to the Oscar-winning soundtrack to The Brutalist.

What doesn't get written about it how Agnel listens; why she plays like this. It's what Williams wants to know. Free jazz and improvised music benefits from the moving image – with music like this it is good to hear recorded sounds, but it is always better to see as well, and to speak about someone's ear and the sounds it desires. To watch someone excavating the 'proper' modes of playing; to see how prosaic objects might produce something unexpected; might create apparitions. To hear Agnel talk develops an understanding of exactly why all this is happening, and why it might be important.

Why do we not know her better? For all the reviews of her collaborative albums and live shows, there are few places she has ever spoken on the page: too few interviews for her status and catalogue and list of collaborators. She speaks, kohl-eyed and clearly, of listening to everything, but in No End, we listen to her. "I present something with a beginning, middle and end," she says. "But there is no end... of course there is no end... because I am the music, and I'm still here."

– Jennifer Lucy Allan

Musique! A text by Philippe De Jonckeere Translated from French. To read the French original click here.

Chicago, the intersection of Wabash Avenue and Jackson Boulevard, 1989 — suddenly, truly suddenly, an elevated subway train screeches as it brakes at the station above our heads, a truck blares its horn, and a gust of wind flaps the tarp of a nearby construction site. Then — nothing. Just a bit of the city’s hum, distant, softened by contrast — after such a trio! — a half-silence for a few seconds, three or maybe four, and I remember that everyone on that street corner looked at each other, incredulous: I don’t think I’ve heard anything so beautiful since — despite the thousand records I own and the hundreds of concerts I’ve attended, some of them unforgettable — Ornette Coleman, Boulez conducting Bartók, The Necks, the Art Ensemble of Chicago (again, Chicago!).

Decades later — already in another millennium — I met Sophie Agnel: first her music, then the musician, then the friend — and thus still the musician. And with her, the sonic miracle of Chicago happened again, a few times: of course at her concerts, but also — and especially — in the shared moments of our friendship. For example: I was accompanying Sophie to a hardware store, and when I started the car, my clutch slipped. Sophie mimicked it with a unique throat coo, then scraped her nails on the dashboard to instantly create a sonic follow-up to that stubborn clutch — which she had, by the way, imitated perfectly. And, truth be told, spending time with Sophie means sometimes having the chance to hear her underline the sounds of the world — in places where they only ask to be heard, re-heard, extended — the sound acting like a smuggler, endlessly crossing the border between noise and music, in both directions.

To put it simply, it’s as if placing Sophie in a room, a garden, a path, a street — wherever — makes everything around us turn into music, or at least into sound. Which is magical. So just imagine what happens when she leans over a piano — when she lays out her instrumentarium on its edge, it’s already music! And then she plays. And in playing, she draws from a singular sonic encyclopedia — her own — her colors, her shapes, her texture, which she transforms, cooking up pianos that perhaps never asked for so much.

And all of this is miraculous. And also fragile. Not easy to capture. Even partially. Even in fragments. And like the silence of an enigma, it all vanishes the moment you name it.

By some miracle — actually, I do know how, but I’m not sure I should say, for fear that it might all disappear — Sam Williams has just made a short film, about fifteen minutes long, that lets us glimpse this sonic and musical world, infinitely poetic, and even lets us catch a glimpse of the enigma at the heart of Sophie Agnel’s music. We see her — and we hear her! — playing in a small, empty concert hall on a Bösendorfer that has seen it all; it’s the one from Instants Chavirés. But we also see — and hear! — her making coffee, and even — even! — saying a few words — while having coffee — about what’s going on around her and, mostly, within her. Which, in a way — if such a thing is possible (and with Sophie Agnel, it is) — amounts to her lending us her ears, her ear, her listening.

Put that way, one might wonder whether good microphones and a quality recorder wouldn’t do the trick. But that would be forgetting what Sophie Agnel calls her oreille interne — her “inner ear,” in French — a sort of instrument, a very precise membrane backed by a vast musical culture, but above all, an alchemical, Baudelairean ability: give her noise — not mud — and she too, like the poet, will make gold from it, or better: music.

And her music is, ultimately, infinite. A music without end or edge, overflowing beyond concerts, as long as the musician is present. Because, quite simply — struggling a bit with the English language in this small, beautifully filmed portrait (though I said I didn’t want to reveal the miracle of this little film) — she ends up saying, awkwardly, but simply: “I am the music!” Which, in fact, is of course without end, since she is still here. And when she comes near her own end — “when I’ll be 80” — there may only be one note left, just one — but what a note! — and it will still be music. Because, fragile as it may be, her music — at least — is irreducible.

– Philippe De Jonckeere