Construire sur les ruines d’un passé encore fumant (DISCREET EDITIONS discreet006) here from a new ad-hoc trio called Les Certitudes – led by the lovely Léo Dupleix, French composer who has slatted many a paling into our aural back-garden plots over the years…Parisian Dupleix has exhibited prowess on the spinet on the recent Delve II record (with Fredrik Rasten), any today he shines on the harpsichord, that most golden of classical instruments beloved of every composer from Haydn to Ligeti.
Dupleix is joined by the clarinet of Juliette Adam and the cello of Félicie Bazelaire, and all three are credited with “shaping” the music here, an apt term for something whose forms are so precise they do indeed resemble an object cut on a lathe, shaped by a master woodworker. Two main concerns guided these carpenter-types as they wielded their virtual chisels – (1) just intonation, applied here to “tones and harmonies”, and making good with this long-maligned and frequently contested method of tuning; (2) something about “resonating wood and metal”, which is about as materialist as a musician can get without climbing into a mahogany wardrobe and reciting the works of Kurt Weill from memory. Dupliex and crew have decided they can’t get around the sheer physical presence of their instruments as objects, the three of which (if placed in the middle of traffic, for instance) would cause an immediate pile-up of angry motorists, as they try and fail to negotiate their Fiats around these blocks, which grow in size the more they are played. With this grotesque simile, I’m trying to account for the blockoid successes of Construire sur les ruines, although it might be fairer to say they’re getting there by sheer persistence – the “long form” watchword is ever-present in the mouths of all three Certitudes, now speaking like the Three Fates as they spin man’s destiny in the stars.
Léo Dupleix is no stranger to the long form approach, but he has also been much more minimal in the past, even to the point of carving a cut-out of his body in the front door, and mailing it to the recording studio where it would baffle the engineers. To further emphasise their point, the cover art shows the frame for a skylight and its magnificent hinge, depicted in stark monochrome to reveal its well-arranged glories, and indicates my woodworker metaphor was not wide of the mark. The title also refers to the actions of a house-builder and may even indicate the smoking ruins of a home, on which site the true artist must continue to build, even at the risk of disrespecting the past. From 25th September 2023.