About Zig-Zag Territoires

A nice review about our label on fanfare.com

Do you enjoy music, the search for excellence, for the ‘grain’ of sound, the quest for apt phrasing, for emotion? Do you appreciate music combined with painting? Since 1997, our artistic motivation, our very existence have served these ideals.

We have built up a catalogue of 100 recordings thanks to the economics of the market: the sale of our CDs, the support of Mécénat Musical Société Générale, the redistribution of copyright and related fees through subsidies from the performing right societies ADAMI, and SPPF du Fonds de Création Musicale, have together enabled us to produce these recordings.

The challenge we face in 2006 will be to offer the public the same standard of new productions in a market undergoing radical transformation, where physical sales are dwindling and we must find new means of compensating for these ‘physical losses’.

We are creating a ‘mid-price’ series, ZEBRA Collection, featuring eight titles from our catalogue, in order to offer the Zig-Zag Territoires spirit for 9€ (European price, inclusive of tax). This will be launched in March 2006.

We are transforming our website so as to make it more interactive, making it possible to listen to all our recordings on a systematic basis, to sell direct to consumers and to offer our titles for download.

We are naturally extremely concerned by developments in the debate on the overall licence, the means of remunerating all the players in musical life. We believe that music may be exchanged, but must, at some point, be purchased by listeners if they wish to be able to continue discovering new artists and new composers.

As Nietzsche wrote more than a century ago: ‘Without music, life would be a mistake.’ We are endeavouring to develop our relationship with our public - and, we hope, their support - so that music can continue to exist, in freedom and with maximum vitality.

ZIG-ZAG Territoires collection

ZIG-ZAG Territoires catalogues offers 100 records since nearly 10 years.

We consider our role as record producers to be that of mediators between artists and public. The choice of programmes, venues and sound balance is the result of a constant dialogue with the artists. As the catalogue has grown, the approach to sound recording developed by Franck Jaffrès has become established as one of the label’s hallmarks.

Zig-Zag Territoires wishes to offer along with its CDs - unique objects, halfway between individual craftsmanship and industry - a genuine intellectual and aesthetic complement, through in-depth booklet notes and original artwork by the painter Anne Peultier. It has turned out to be an exciting adventure, enriching the experience of record-making, which becomes an artistic exchange between label, musicians, sound engineer, painter, designer.

We have built the label on artists whom we have succeeded in bringing forward ourselves, such as the harpsichordist Blandine Rannou (complete keyboard works of Rameau, English and French Suites of J. S. Bach, works by Couperin) and on the arrival of artists of international reputation: Ensemble 415 and Chiara Banchini, Anima Eterna et Jos van Immerseel. The values we represented - the capacity to listen to artists, and creativity in graphic design -certainly corresponded precisely to what Jos van Immerseel no longer found with Sony...

We are the children of the apogee of the compact disc.

We are the children of the apogee of the compact disc. 10 years ago, we chose to be record producer and we are still committed to share our passion for music...

It was a responsible act which enabled us to become players in the world of music and bring to it our personal approach. We wanted to communicate to others the experience to which artists introduce us every day: a unique appropriation of a work which renders it evident, limpid. Our history has been marked by these miraculous ‘epiphanies’ shared between musicians, a composer, a sound engineer, an artistic director, a painter, a designer: a Zig-Zag Territoires team constantly listening out for such instants of music in order to extract from them the essence, the vibrancy that we want to transmit to others.

This adventure is a joy for us and, we hope, for our public. The circumstances of our diffusion have been particularly favourable: sponsorship from Mécénat Musical Société Générale between 2000 and 2006, distribution by harmonia mundi since 2000, and, when we started out, a market that carried us along with it, a market that was still curious, open-minded, eager for young artists, repertoires and labels. Since 2003, our metier has become extremely difficult on the distribution front. The public no longer shows the same curiosity, and it is ‘marketed’ products, bargain sales, and boxed sets aiming at the lowest common denominator that occupy the already diminished space in record stores.

We wish to seize the opportunity of our tenth anniversary to appeal to the public to take risks: to live its passions, to show its curiosity, its generosity. Life is short. We all have within us a need for authenticity, an urge to have our senses stirred, to give free rein to our emotions - and such desires are hardly likely to be aroused by pre-formatted marketing. To spend a personal moment with music is a way of heightening one’s self-awareness, emotions and humanity. Long may our CDs continue to stir this life force in you!

Sylvie Brély and Franck Jaffrès