l'écorce chante la forêt

Frédéric Blondy | Jean-Sébastien Mariage | Dan Warburton| cs016

Speaking about "L'écorce chante la forêt" with the usual discourse applied to the products of the "reductionist" school would be unjust and unadequate, because we would be labelling its "truth" in a delimitative way. The world in which this music is happening is not, decidedly, the one of the new wave of the conceptual improvisation, even if it's improvised and the musicians here reunited are improvisers. Dan Warburton (violin), Jean-Sébastien Mariage (electric guitar) and Frédéric Blondy (piano) improvise in this new and excellent title of the Creative Sources Recordings catalogue what others compose in the domains of the American and European "classical" contemporary music. Several musical references come immediately to mind: Morton Feldman, Helmut Lachenmann or Luciano Berio. Here, it doesn't matter to what degree one economizes on sound or reduces the volume; it's a question of how to do more with less. This music is about intensity, even density. And we shouldn't be surprised at the title – if music was once the attempt at human reproduction of Nature's music, before we invented our own mechanical, electric and electronic sounds, we return here to the lost natural dimension of the earth's murmurs. The wind agitating the leaves, very quietly, or raindrops falling, or a small animal moving in the undergrowth, sound accidents that don't distract us from a presence that lives in the majesty of its silence, the internal life of all things. We even can smell the forest, in a subtle synesthesia which is not cinematographic only because it's made by the intimacy of our own visual and sensitive memories. A beautiful work indeed.

Rui Eduardo Paes