“Rêves et Cauchemars is a feast of sounds, on a music that crosses the boundaries of Roach, Vangelis and Tangerine Dream”
1 Introduction Onirique 7:57
2 Searching for a Sleep 11:58
3 Travelling Mind 8:31
4 Hypercool Pink 12:07
5 Living in a Dream 9:12
6 Mystic Revelation 12:14
7 Ambiant and Cosmic 13:12
8 Origin of Time 12:11
9 The End of a Dream 11:17
(DVD 91:26) (V.F.)
(Ambient and psychedelic EM)
EM is an intellectual, a cerebral art which couples marvellously with the abstract art. One remembers these concerts of electronic, progressive or psychedelic music of the 70's? Often, they were accompanied with projections of abstract drawings, with images in constant duel between the arc of the civilization and of its cosmic eye or still with laser beams. Light shows, it was named! It was the words put in music, the vision of music composers without words, or with so few. This way of making thing has end by being lost in time, breathless it became by the kaleidoscopic prisms which were dying of a lack of resource, of creativity. Answering an invitation threw by the city of Vertou, municipality on the West of France, Olivier Briand and Guillaume Diard are uniting music and images for a concert given on April 13th, 2012. RÊVES ET CAUCHEMARS renews with this old tradition. It's the meeting point between an EM which embraces all its qualifiers and all of its subtleties in order to follow the highly paradoxical panoramas of computer generated images, sepia images, allegorical drawings and visual effects which surround both the music of Olivier Briand and its subdued silhouette. A very discreet OB, but not his music, who agrees to play the absentees to let all the room for this allegory of images where our cities get lost in clouds in split, where the cosmos is melting in our oceans and where the synthetic spider webs becomes confused with the skeletons of our technologies. This is a concert of music and images that is worth all the words.
Introduction Onirique spreads the impact of its naming with an ambient introduction where the floating music takes the shape of these abstract graphs which move as ink of big octopuses. The tone is given for a concert of sounds and images where the powers of the abstract art caress the borders of the fertile imaginations. The synthesist from Nantes chooses a musical abstracted vocabulary by making sing his synths more than to make roll his rhythms into those slow cosmic waltzes which encircle the multicolored and the multiform images of Guillaume Diard. These synth layers sing and roll up until the first rhythmic stammering with Searching for a Sleep. The rhythm is soft. Drummed, it offers an always ambient structure which accompanies the mind-blowing harmonies of a synth impregnated by scents of jazz on a visual pattern which mixes skillfully the images of cities, of cosmos and movements abstracted in colors as much varied as the forms which dance there. Little by little the rhythm gets loose to follow the parade of the synths which become more melodious while that the images take the forms of water, clouds, celestial bodies and outlines of clocks while filtering Olivier Briand's silhouette who is at ease in his quiet anonymity. Travelling Mind continues to exploit the slow rhythms of RÊVES ET CAUCHEMARS with movements of sequences which skip nervously in the shadows of their doubles. It's a beautiful hypnotic rhythm that Olivier is offering to us. A rhythm which slowly follows a gradation and of which the pace adopts literally the breath of the abstract images. While this rhythm continues to split up its harmonies, the synth doesn't stop to modulate beautiful solos fill by the delights of the analog era. After a soft morphic intro where the arpeggios shape the dreams, Hypercool Pink beats of a secret life where the rhythm has difficulty to pierce this soft soporific veil. The images are dancing with a thick cloud of strands which interlace and sparkle of their igneous colors, following the rhythm of the seraphic singings of the synths which communicate with the whales and which conceal of their ethereal breaths the fine organic pulsations of an absent rhythm.
Living in a Dream gets RÊVES ET CAUCHEMARS out of the limbos with a soft rhythm where the sequences subdivide their rhythmic harmonies like a lively synchronized swimming. The movement is soft and reminds these structures of cosmic rhythm from Tangerine Dream with some quavering frictions of which the knocks are sounding strangely like breaths in an empty bottle, shaping so a deep stillness dance which stirs constantly under a thick cloud of synth pads as abstract than melodic. The symbiosis of the rhythm and the screen shots reaches its peak with this string of twinkling sequences which pound in all directions, fitting marvellously with the artistic glistening of Guillaume Diard and his images which sparkle as abstract pearls. With Mystic Revelation, we enter in a kind of timeless space. The music suits very well to the quantity of kaleidoscopic images which parades, while letting appear outlines and silhouettes of OB and his equipment, a little as if both accomplices wanted to hypnotize us and to attract us in a sonic and visual abyss without end. Except that the hypnosis comes with the soft rhythm of Ambient and Cosmic which, for me, is the pinnacle of this album. The rhythmic approach reminds me enormously of Steve Roach, or still Michael Stearns, with some little footsteps which swirl in an oblong vertical snail perfumed by strata of synths with the troubling futuristic visions of Vangelis. The rhythm is superb and spins with such neatness as our ears ask for more of it. And Olivier Briand knows that he shapes a small jewel because he puts the bombast on seraphic harmonies which catch a dreamlike spiral where spin felted sequences and tinkle the wings of the angels. This is great OB here. Origin of Time presents the ashes of a beautiful lullaby forgotten in the temporal terrible beds. The vision of Olivier competes easily the Dantesque approaches of Vangelis with this track of which the abstract drift fails on a rhythm which scatters its sequences like the time drops its seconds in a crazy running against its mechanism. We are in the cave of the abstract art and at no moment our ears, as our eyes, wish a conclusion. And nevertheless The End of a Dream brings us to it with the chimed ashes of Origin of Time which goes astray in these magic drawings, in these figures of psychological calligraphy which feed the abstract and experimental approaches of a concert where the prisms are just more than only sonic dimensions.
Sylvain Lupari (November 7th, 2013) *****
Available at PWM Distrib