Hervé Provini

Hervé Provini, a Swiss drummer, fuses rock's raw force with the inventive nuance of free improvisation, echoing his chief inspirations Tony Williams and Ronald Shannon Jackson. Recognition came chiefly through a late-1990s-to-early-2000s trilogy of albums that reversed the conventional dynamic between musician and mechanism. On Biological and Chaotic Music, Musique Nucléaire, and Musique Amoureuse he engages in combat with a Disklavier piano steered by his own computer programs, which he designed expressly to generate unexpected responses.

Born in 1963, Provini absorbed hard rock, prog rock, and the jazz-rock surge while coming of age in the 1970s. Drawn to percussion from childhood, he began playing during his teenage years. After pursuing engineering and architecture studies that introduced him to basic computer programming, he redirected his focus entirely toward music and enrolled at the Geneva Conservatoire Populaire de Musique, joining Rainer Boesch's acousmatic class. Since that time his work has divided between electroacoustic composition, primarily for theatre and dance, and acoustic improvisation within the Swiss jazz community. He has collaborated with Sylvie Courvoisier, Hans Köch, Michel Godard, Vinz Vonlanthen, Stephan Wittwer, and Elliott Sharp, and has appeared on recordings by Bertrand Gallaz's Bare Bones Power Trio, Maurice Magnoni, and Jacques Demierre.

Approaching programming as a drummer, he sought to preserve a human rhythmic feel while coding the remaining elements. In the mid-'90s the piano remained the sole acoustic instrument reliably controllable by computer via Yamaha's Disklavier. Provini therefore built programs that converted non-musical data into musical output through genetic and chaotic algorithms, incorporating mathematical analysis of Jacques Demierre's playing style for Musique Nucléaire. The resulting three solo albums appeared on Unit Records between 1999 and 2002. Provini continues to teach music at Geneva's EPI.