Horla – Fantômes

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LP – Le Cabanon

Written, produced and mixed in the Northeast of Madagascar by Clovis Lemée, a musician and co-director of Cabanon Records, aka Horla, this LP is a tribute to the savage nature, animism and mysterious essence of this charming land, where phantasmagorical visions, strange rituals and magical primitivism are a poetic constant. The making of Fantômes took about two years. The composition’s style follows rarefied and cutting-edge free jazz, where we can find strong local and tribal elements, full of different crossings, rhythms and harmonies. “Opium quartet” starts with a repeated trumpet note and dissonant, granular sounds, but is also hypnotic, dense and swinging. The following “Bois-Pierre” is more nervous and rhythmically variegated and has a dreamy cadence that engages the listener in a blast of drums and obscure sequences. “Jumbo score” is once again a rhythmic and slightly tribal composition: full with animal sounds, dark and lost in space, deaf echoes. “Haschich jazz” takes a polyphonic approach and includes a lot of sound sources, highlighted by crossed recordings of evocative church choirs. Horla often makes use of random strategies, which he sets up with a certain number of prearranged variables, with the result that the microphone recordings, the acoustic instruments and the synths are basically impossible to distinguish. The editing of each track is accurate and challenging, as in, for example, “The coconut fall”, a polished score that is harmonic, elegiac and slightly melancholic. “Qui sont ces fantômes” is also quiet, based on the repetition of a simple chord, this time with a harpsichord. “Palissandre spleen” is the shortest track of the album, slightly longer than two minutes, a mix of acoustic recordings and synths from a stylized xylophone. The following “Veillée pour les morts” softens with a double contraposition, with swing and softened treatments on one side, and lopsided rhythms on the other. “Frame-Océan” is the final track, and here also we find melodic constructs and improvisational rhythms, including tonal scrapings and background noises

 

Horla – Fantômes