Jérôme Lorichon / Emmanuelle Parrenin / Quentin Rollet
Nosferatu
FRANCE BISOU RECORDS BIS-021-U-B CD + Book (2024)
Trio of distinguished French improvisers provide soundtrack music for the famous Murnau silent horror film from 1922.
They did it live at the Cinémathèque Française in 2021, then a year later Potemkine Films invited them to add the same music to a DVD re-release (to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this landmark piece of cinema history). That plan didn’t quite pan out, for licensing reasons it seems, but now here’s the music on a CD along with some excellent graphiste images and comic strips from Marie-Pierre Brunel, Foolz, Caroline Sury and Alexios Tjoyas, printed in a handy paperback in stark black and white.
Nothing wrong with the music of course, which is a pleasing array of electro-acoustic sounds made with saxophones, trumpet, Buchla synth, percussion, live electronics, voices, and even a hurdy-gurdy – an instrument I would personally love to see deployed more often in an experimental context. Quentin Rollet has one of the most recognisable voices in improvised sax-playing today, reminiscent of Steve Lacy or Lol Coxhill in its slippery shapes, and only a hard-hearted troll could fail to be swayed by his altruistic charms. But it’s not dark enough for me. The trio’s take on Nosferatu doesn’t really get close to the atmosphere or uncanny terror of Murnau’s images. Instead, they play the film as though it’s a slightly unsettling walk in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont after closing time on one crisp Autumn night.
The track title ‘Entre Chien et Loup’ is a French phrase which I’ve heard and read many times, and admire its precision in expressing such a subjective condition and a very human apprehension of things we don’t fully understand, things bordering on the supernatural. Yet the music here doesn’t fully capture it. I had high hopes for the long track ‘La Traversée en Eaux Troubles’, which is evidently intended to accompany the grisly sea voyage of the vampire and his memorable appearance when he springs up out of the coffin he has stashed below deck. But the music is a rather pedestrian meander through modal playing and digital drones, barely registering a flicker on the fear-o-meter.
The four visual artists do a better job of quickening the blood pulse with their images; Brunel accurately reflects the bleakness and futility of the source, Sury sings of the violence and how the characters are locked into a framework as unbreakable as one of her heavy-outlined emblems. Tjoyas gets closest to the horror with his ugly, trembling lines and inexplicable pictograms; Foolz somehow finds a species of black slapstick humour in episodes from the story. Great package, but the music needs an extra dose of horror to truly match the diabolical plans of Count Orlok! From 27th June 2024.