Press coverage

Eye on Monday 22 September 1997

Art Monthly, November 1997:
"His voice, with the hard, short vowels of the Spanish accent, gave an appropriately sinister tone to his words; the voice of an old card-harp who has seen it all and who has only limited patience with his students.

"[…] As people in the audience shuffled around with imaginary cards, struggling to keep up with his instructions, he ploughed on relentlessly towards the conclusion of the trick. One would, in order to be able to follow the instructions, have to be already quite adept at handling cards. The instructive nature of the monologue was therefore quite limited and instead the words became part of the music – an evocative and even confessional warm, sultry and intriguing voice which spoke of shady dealings." (Juan Cruz)

Parkett, issue 43, 1995:
"The use of public broadcast facilities widens the impact of Juan Muñoz's work in fields which have hardly been investigated as a legitimate media for visual expression. The impact of such broadcasts is, of course, minimal and constitutes little more than a gentle prod. But then this is the essential nature of a work in an ambient framework."(Gavin Bryars - read modified version)

Q, October 1997:

"Gavin Bryars's first release since 1995's acclaimed Farewell To Philosophy is an elegant drawing together of his various compositional strands. Composed in collaboration with "illusionist" Juan Muñoz A Man In A Room, Gambling is essentially a set of instructions on how to cheat at card set to music. Muñoz provides the sensuously Latin-toned commentary (imagine Raoul Julia crossed with Paul Daniels, but not a lot) while The Gavin Bryars Ensemble essay some wonderfully plangent chamber music - the immaculately pressed entertainment at some louche red velvet casino. An unlikely but highly accessible pairing, Les Fiancailles and The South Downs are lovely pastoral vignettes while The North Shore especially written for viola player Bill Hawkes is an exquisite Vaughan Williams-esque bliss-out. Audacious, sublime and highly recommended." (David Sheppard)

The Guardian, 18 September 1997:

“Rather than using objects, or working in a gallery space, A Man In A Room, Gambling is an extraordinary aural sculpture, the invention of a mental space which exists solely in the mind of the listener. There is a man in a room gambling in your head. Bryars's orchestration, rather than simply decorating the space, provides a kind of architecture for the work, its lighting, atmosphere, pace and choreography. In the work, the distinction between one art form and another are broken down, to the extent that they become irrelevant.” (Adrian Searle)

The Sunday Times, 28 September 1997:
“Each of the 10 parts – a different selection of five was offered each evening – lasts precisely five minutes and consists of advice for cardsharps thought up and read by the Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz, who sat at a card table to the rear of the players. The music, always at the same tempo but discreetly altering, underpins what Bryars and Muñoz conceive of as a fixed radio slot, like the shipping forecast.” (Paul Driver)



Eye on Monday, 22 September 1997:
“It could be argued that music and sculpture are closely related: that whereas a sculptor is concerned with the manipulation of matter in three-dimensional space, a musician is concerned with the manipulation of energy (sound) in space . Perhaps some sense of this common ground lay behind the idea for a collaboration between the sculptor Juan Muñoz and the composer Gavin Bryars. In the end, though, A Man in a Room, Gambling - sections of which received their British premiere on Thursday - is a sharp and curiously moving evocation of the differences between them.” (Robert Hanks)