[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Hellebore: “Film de ripratoria”
From the album Il y a des jours (1985)
How is it that we can imagine musics that we have never heard? What begins to explain the phenomenon of ideal music, that premonition of a world of sound long before it is encountered? Why this unmistakable feeling of déjà vu upon hearing certain music for the first time, as if we apprehend something inexplicably pre-existent, something that elicits both a prelapsarian delight in pure perception and an uncanny recognition of the product of some cosmic hypothesis: in a universe such as this, this music must exist.
The music of Hellebore approaches an ideal form that has long haunted my imagination, an ideal which I could not express in words, and even now eludes description. For now it may suffice to call it a music of deadly playfulness.
Hellebore was a French quartet composed of Jean Cael (bass, synthesizer), Alain Casari (alto sax, clarinet, flute), Antoine Gindt (guitar, synthesizer), Daniel Koskowitz (drums, percussion), and Denis Tagu (piano, organ). Il y a des jours (“There are those days”), recorded in 1983-84 and released in 1985, was their only album. Produced in a run of just 1000 copies, the album is now something of a collector’s item among aficianados. But through the magic of the internet and the devotion of an anonymous blogger (bless their hearts), it can be yours.
Played 80 time(s).
October 08, 2010, 8:50pm
