Minimalist genius Bruno Duplant continues to haunt my life with his works. For a composer who exercises such restraint, he sure makes a lot of records. Releases from Inexhaustible Editions, Edition Wandelweiser Records and Unfathomless have been arriving here on wings made of soap bubbles, traced in delicate hatchery by dragonflies.
Today here’s nocturne incertain (DISSIPATIO diss006), expressed in lower case type as expected, where he’s joined by Julien Heraud, there’s a vague washed-out monochrome photo on the cover, the package is released on one of Nicola Quiriconi’s labels where supernatural spectres and eerie ghosts do flock. Heraud’s work has not graced our listening chambers before, but I see he’s been partnered with Bruno D since 2012, when (as part of small groups) they made Worked Without Noise and Movement And Immobility. This former saxophonist turned to the electro-acoustic mode around 2016, and after experimenting with mixing desks, tapes, microphones and synths, he devoted his digits to the study of modular systems (which are probably very demanding and challenging to work with).
These two half-hour suites, probably arrived at through careful layering and edits of multiples stretches, promise plenty rewarding moments in the islands of the unknown. Who doesn’t like the dusky twilight zones of a “nocturne”? And especially one so tinged with intrigue and ambiguity, as promised by the “incertain” part of the title. The music itself, though slow and still, is markedly more eventful than what I tend to associate with Duplant and his challenging, zoned-out constructs of emptiness, and certain details I will highlight for the tourist include crackling insect swarms (be they virtual or real), a sketched-in keyboard melody played on an electric piano or marimba patch, and a fascinating tape-wobble which is repeated so often it’s clearly not a glitch…the musicians are at one time limning a beautiful moss-garden verdi-scape of impossible beauty, while simultaneously revealing how they create the illusion for us.
All of this atmospheric, detailed amibentery borders on the romantic; one feels that Debussy, and Satie at a pinch, would have approved of this latter-day salon mode in the digital manner. From 28 February 2022, from the label that brought us Deison, Heimito Künst, and Alessandro Ragazzo.