AVAILABILITY:
www.plateformestudio.com
www.eroica.com
"J'ai vu repasser toute mon existence,
le film de ma vie…"
This is an exemplary
collection of Alain Amouyal's "Catharsis"
music on 10 CD singles. This is presented
in a state-of-the-art plastic CD wallet
with some brief notes, unlike the two
related discs I recently reviewed, with
which it shares six tracks.
Conscience en expansion,
despite its excellence, is omitted but
four additional pieces (almost another
80 minutes!) are included, and it seems
sensible to focus on these. Certitude
is the shortest, at just over thirteen
minutes, with the longest (and most
complex), Résonance, lasting
a full half-hour. The soundworld on
these other tracks is as idiomatic as
any, again bringing the words redemptive,
healing, and, unsurprisingly, cathartic
to mind. The effect, to these ears,
would be less successful, if it did
not take us, en route to its ultimate
resolution, to some fairly bleak and
desolate places. The quote above, from
the sleevenotes, should indicate this
- a film of most of our lives would
be likely to plumb some sort of emotional
depths at some point. Alain Amouyal's
music, as I pointed out in my previous
review, has something to say to us all,
with its timeless and universal relevance.
Résonance,
on first impressions, might seem to
be compromised by its incorporation
of ambient wave sounds (surely now close
to being a cliché) but soon I
was reminded of the subtle and highly
appropriate use of similar material
in Jan Garbarek's inimitable Molde
Canticle. Later, I was also put
in mind of the marvellous Danna and
Clément piece To the Land
Beneath the Waves (from the forgotten
classic Summerland) and even
the artistic highpoint of the "Balearic
Beat" movement, A Man Called Adam's
recently reissued Barefoot in the
Head. In the end I decided that
the sea sounds were so integral to the
piece that they transcended (a word
that crops up a lot in my thinking about
Amouyal) any simplistic preconceptions
and, after all, Studio Plateforme, where
all this astonishing music issues from,
is located in Sete, on the shores of
the Mediterranean. What does it sound
like? Quite typically, the music is
predominantly slow, often very slow,
pretty melancholic (Eric Serra's soundtrack
to The Big Blue, filtered through
the mourning muse of late Joy Division?),
wailing (whaling?) synthetic organ sounds
rising and falling as the tide ebbs
and flows, subconscious, submarine cathedrals
invoked by tintinnabulist percussion.
Eventually the waves give way to running
water (in a cave?), reminding me of
the composer's Orphic affinities - given
what has gone before, I naturally think
of the River Styx, also a recent inspiration
to the great contemporary Georgian composer
Giya Kancheli. All in all, Résonance,
heard in the right conditions, undisturbed
with full concentration on the music
possible, comes across as a piece of
desperate beauty, a musical yearning
(what the Germans call sehnsucht)
for a mythical/archetypal Arcadian reconnection
to the land, the soil, nature, the elements,
now lost in the mundanity and busy triviality
of a great deal of modern life.
Certitude is
perhaps more typical Amouyal, using
melancholic woodwind sounds over muted
martial percussives, but not quite reaching
the heights attained by tracks like
Vivre la Montée, Plateforme
and Passage (also included here
and reviewed previously). It is, however,
softened a little by the addition of
some haunting, uncredited female vocals
and piano and therefore looks forward
to the later excursion into full orchestral
music on Frames for a Fairy Tale.
Still, the very effective and affecting
archaic, "Greek" atmosphere is very
much to the fore.
La Plainte de la
Terre starts with a warmer, more
immediately welcoming sound than most
of this music, although a strange, repeating
(bird?) cry fades in and out in the
distance. The latter aside, and it isn't
really disturbing, just a slightly unsettling
constant, there is an unusually beatific
aura to this track (see also Coeur
Éclairé), a calmness
that only tends to emerge at certain
points, usually towards the end, in
most of Amouyal's music.
Ils sont venus
is different again and, although the
familiar footprints (modal and pentatonic
sequences invoking ancient, pastoral
idylls) are in place, there are some
faster, but not fast, sections than
usual and some lovely, keening viola
sounds. Eleven minutes in, a trumpet
heralds some of the most driven and
overtly percussive music I have heard
from this source. This shows us the
composer at his most filmic, with echoes
of Shore's score for the Ring Trilogy,
although far less opulent in terms of
its soundscape.
In addition to the
pieces described above, you also get
all bar one of the tracks from the two
series samplers, including what I would
regard as the two masterpieces of the
composer's œuvre to date, Vocalises
and Voyage sur la Spirale. Some
may prefer the more conventional format/packaging
of the sampler discs but this set is
virtually definitive; I repeat my strong
recommendation of this music to anyone
interested in modern composition/electronica/improvisation
but who also enjoys music which is both
listenable and substantial.
Neil Horner
see also earlier
review by Neil
Alain Amouyal, keyboards and programming 
