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  • Writer's pictureSylvain Lupari

BERTRAND LOREAU: Correspondances (2015)

Updated: Aug 4, 2020

Correspondances is a personal album which is based on samplings and bits/pieces of melodies strummed on a dark piano

1 Correspondances I 25:36 2 Correspondances II 35:25 Patch Work Music

(CD 61:11) (V.F.) (Ambient, avant-gardist and concret Music)

Noises of cars, or scooters, on streets. A fluid and dense circulation! City noises being awake. Footsteps in a ground dirtied with twigs. Noises of screen doors which creak. Winds, carillons, voices and the flute! It sings a melancholic air through voices and crackling of fire and especially on the curves of piano notes as much pensive as these fluty harmonies which float there weakly. This flute loses its airs in the hubbub of the automobiles which loses its din in carillons of church which lose their ringings in the curves of a short line of sequences. And it's the return of the crackling of a garden fire. Welcome to CORRESPONDANCES! Welcome in this Bertrand Loreau's very personal universe. And those who hope and expect in this last sonic essay from the Nantes synthesist something near From Past to Past or still Spiral Lights, will be quits for a good disappointment which gradually will turn into a fascination in front of this mosaic of sounds, atmospheres and melodies which are scattered in the most avant-gardist work of the one who gave us the brilliant Nostalgic Steps in 2013.

There is little to say there, or many according to each of us, on this last opus from Bertrand Loreau who uses the Patch Work Music platform to launch on the market a very intimist album. An album dedicated to Jean Paul Vince, a French teacher who introduced Bertrand to the poetry and whose music has guided his path towards his last rest, and which possesses all the attributes of the first works of Vangelis; Sex Power and Fais que ton Rêve soit plus long que la Nuit, the aspect of joyful and lively melodies in less. Let's make room to melancholy! Bertrand Loreau walks here on the sides of a composed past with soft monotonous chants which are strummed on a piano, sometimes acoustic and sometimes electric, managed by very nostalgic fingers which have so much to tell. A pianist in a bar for souls in drift and who roams on the reminiscences of his period of young adult with pieces of music choose and inserted here and there between long parchments of samplings, which are connected closely or remotely at that time, that Bertrand Loreau has captured on a digital tape recorder. Here there are no long movements in spirals and unforeseen developments hidden in the heavy perfumes of the Berlin School. We can hear some of the musical influences which rocked the youth of Loreau in the opening of Correspondances II, which does very Klaus Schulze period Moondawn, as well as these heavy sequences which skip smoothly in a small segment of the opening of Correspondances I. There are also these layers of sibylline choruses and these mystic mists which are the vestiges of Berlin School. But for the rest, we are in the avant-gardist territories. Although CORRESPONDANCES is nested in two long movements, it's more about an album of atmospheres with a pleiad of dark melodies. There is more than a dozen, among which some are forged in an acoustic six-strings and/or flavored by a flute full of serenity. These monotonous chants are sad and seem shaped in the solitude while that certain samplings, in particular the singings of birds and the babbling of cherubs, dictate a happier, a more serene approach. These airs of melancholy are immured in bulwarks of samplings and electronic effects which drive the music on the banks of concrete music and of very modernist works where the electro acoustics dominates the electronics. As we can notice it, we are far from Berlin School but not of the creativity. The exercise can seem heavy, but everything lies in the way of approaching CORRESPONDANCES. If we let ourselves go and that we listen one track at a time our ears well riveted in a set of earphones, we catch ourselves to wander in the corridors of our inner development. There where our memories always end by meet some of others, no matter where and no matter who. Like correspondences between crossed fates.

Sylvain Lupari (December 10th, 2015) ***½**

Available at Patch Work Music

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