CD – Cave12
Antoine Chessex is a talented Swiss composer, sax player and experimental musician, also familiar with sound installations and trans-disciplinarian collaborations. For “Dust for 3 Violins, Backtape and Electronics”, as the description makes clear, the author (in the recordings made at the Berghain, a very famous techno club in the German capital) makes use of the contribution of Elfa Rún Kristinsdóttir, Ekkehard Windrich and Steffen Tast, a trio of violinists accompanied by the electronic manipulations and tape recorder of Italian Valerio Tricoli, himself a composer of electroacoustic music and radical improviser. The score is built in a very calibrated way for tension and rigor, dilated through all of the 29 minutes of the execution but always remaining very stratified and trenchant. The sounds become more and more complex in the intensity, mass and substance of the variations, which are formed into an extremely thick and coherent sound mix. The orchestration can’t leave you indifferent and the slow but constant metaphysical progression works as an indulgent premonition of the final catharsis. As in a sort of audio “black hole” that attracts and absorbs everything, the quartet places every single element, organizing a changeable transition zone, a space where the emotional temperature rises rapidly, incrementing the stabilization of the superimpositions, the endless resurfacing of threads and sound upheavals. All of this is lovably completed by elegant artwork – faintly optical – black/white and bound in paperboards.