EtudeRecords

REVIEWS

Though Fages takes pains to assert that the present album is not a posthumous homage to his father, who died a month after the recording was concluded, and also dedicated it to his father’s caretaker, the music was clearly intended as a reaction to and an observation of what he refers to as “the slow decay of my father’s life”. I take it that it’s safe to translate the title as, “songs for a slow demise”.
I suppose it’s a natural tendency in such situations to create work which might be more accommodating to the person involved, in the case of more abstract-oriented artists, to turn toward more traditional and emotionally evocative formats. Jason Lescalleet, whose magnificent release from last year one can hardly help but recall, included his daughter singing “Molly Malone” and structured his noise-filled tape manipulations into a near programmatic summation of his loss and acceptance. While I’m certainly not familiar with everything Fages has committed to disc (I don’t know his earlier solo recording “a cavall entre dos cavalls”), the pieces on “cançons per a un lent retard” are far more overtly emotional in a traditional sense than anything I’ve previously heard from him, though they’re resolutely clear-eyed and unflinching. It’s some pretty great music.Though one could easily note the almost mandatory sonic indebtedness to Bailey, Fages (on acoustic guitar throughout) is generally more consonant in approach but no less incisive. Sometimes, as near the beginning of the lengthy “suspense horizontal”, there are clear precedents in “opposite”-era Sugimoto. If anything, however, I found myself thinking of Loren Connors, though minus the blues saturation, substituting instead a Spanish melancholy with tinges of flamenco (occasionally quite clear as in the central portion of "tangent al dit” or much of “gir lent”). On “paraula clau”, Fages, otherwise heard solo, performs an intriguing duet with Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga who is responsible for detuning the guitar on the run, as it were, resulting in a haunting, bleak series of wavering moans, buzzes and taps. Fages tends to stay in the mid to lower range of the guitar, playing harshly plucked single notes against vast, abyssal chords that swallow them whole.The technical and influential aspects are really secondary, though. The music here is extraordinary, often brutally so. Fages opens himself to the experience of a loved one’s deterioration, neither glancing away in “good taste” or reluctance to face reality nor ignoring the enormous emotional price it’s exacting on him. No pathos, just hard-edged sorrow.When he closes the disc with “retall llarg”, using perhaps something like an e-bow on the strings to generate layers of morose drones before merging into a slow cascade of dolorous notes, there’s a sense of true exhaustion. It’s not pretty or hopeful, just very true.

-Brian Olewnick

The new trend in electronic music seems to be going acoustic and sometimes even start writing 'real songs'. Ferran Fages, a Catalan musician whose resume mentions, besides guitar, no-input mixer and turntables in Cremaster also took this step. On A cavall entre dos cavalls and this album it's just guitar. Although radical, the approach isn't completely different. The music on Cançons per a un lent retard is very much everything that happens besides the notes. When strumming the strings a microscope is put on the 'unwanted sounds', as it were. Just to reveal all the overtones, scrapes, harmonics, resonations and even a mild drone that happen in this process and are very much wanted here. Although the endresult shows some similarity with the work of Derek Bailey and Eugene Chadbourne I feel Fages' approach in the end is closer to Alva Noto and Ryoji Ikeda, albeit less rhythmic.Fages' impulse to compose this music was the slow decay of his father's life. Not a posthumous tribute, as the album was finished for a month when his father passed away. The music follows this by taking its time, slowly and thoughtful. Various techniques are used to get all kinds of sounds from the guitar, but still within the conventional means of pick and sometimes a bottleneck, no extended Chadbourne techniques. Some parts do remind of John Zorn's tribute to "Pops", the infamous The Book Of Heads. Cançons... is easier to digest than that one though. With its heavy theme of his father's decline it's by no means 'easy', it's heavy with emotion.The devil is in the detail as the saying goes, this album needs to be played on a decent soundsystem at loud enough a volume to reveal all the intricacies that are invoked from the metal- and woodwork of the acoustic guitar. The only critique would be the length, it's quite heavy to sit through the entire 70 minute course of it. At the same time it feels rather disrespectful to turn it off halfway through. Had Ferran cut a little fat here and there it would've been a quite stunning album.

-Martijn Busink (Musique Machine)

Ferran Fages apprécie particulièrement la résonance de ses cordes en acier. Lorsqu'il extrait un son de sa guitare acoustique, il le laisse longuement s'épanouir, le sertit de silence jusqu'à ce qu'on l'ait oublié puis, seulement, en ose un second qui s'inscrit également dans sa propre durée, se love au creux d'un vide sous-jacent et disparaît le plus naturellement du monde. Parfois, dans sa phonétique propre, il tolère une diphtongue, deux notes qui s'accouplent en un semblant d'accord et engendrent des harmoniques pures comme l'eau claire. Dans cet éloge de la lenteur, chaque sonorité n'existe que pour elle-même et ne fait partie que d'un tout supposé, une construction empirique dont nous ne percevrons la cohérence que lorsque tout aura été dit, entre fêlures soudaines et longues plages sans reliefs perceptibles. De temps à autre, un fil d'acier glisse hors de son trajet, frise le bord du manche et acquiert une étrange profondeur, chargée de sens et de danger. Ou bien c'est un bottleneck dont la froideur entre en contact avec le métal vibrant et impose une conception aléatoire de la justesse. Sur la plage 6, encore, un ami vient détendre les cordes de l'instrument et le grincement des mécaniques nous évoque une percussion inconnue et que l'on croyait d'abord frappée sur le bois de la table. Mais, en dépit de ces légers accidents le paysage créé par l'Espagnol ressemblerait plutôt à un No man's land dépourvu de la moindre aspérité.
Pourtant, on ne s'ennuie jamais à l'écoute de cet album où le néant tient lieu d'enjeu à part entière. Le désir de cette musique est né d'un long retard, d'un rendez-vous avec la mort sans cesse repoussé alors que Ferran Fages assistait, impuissant, à la longue dégénérescence de son père, décédé un mois après la séance. Mais ce n'est pas non plus à une macabre fascination que l'on cède. En fait, on est d'abord séduit par ce choix esthétique totalement assumé, par l'étonnante sensation de vie qui perdure malgré les lenteurs et longueurs inhérentes à tout projet de ce style et, surtout, par la construction évidente d'un évènement en pleine maturation qui s'invente à mesure qu'il se produit. Il y a même un certain suspens dans la perspective de cet assemblage inexorable dont on ne sait encore rien, comme si l'on craignait que ça ne dérape et que l'édifice ne parvienne jamais à l'accomplissement escompté.
La plage 4 est d'ailleurs assez symptomatique, à ce propos, puisque, à la différence de l'ensemble, elle accumule les signes au point de paraître un condensé de l'œuvre générale. Notes simples, doubles, triples, accords entiers, rythme d'abord fortuit puis se précisant, elle procède par strates superposées avant de dérouler jusqu'au silence le fil de sa progression générale.
Ainsi, les 70 courtes minutes de cet album translucide nous donnent-elles à entendre, dans la dilatation de l'instant, une sorte de composition imminente dont la structure funambule demeure longtemps suspendue au-dessus du vide, entre désir et achèvement, forme effective et rêve de cette forme. Comme lorsque l'on ne sait plus si l'être aimé est encore là ou bien s'il est déjà absent.

-Joel Pagier (Improjazz)