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Pascal Comelade: “The Hallucinogenic Espontex Sinfonia”
From the album Espontex Sinfonia (2006)
Pascal Comelade is a French Catalan musician whose work has explored a variegated yet highly distinctive constellation of sounds and styles. His first album, released under the title Fluence (1975), was heavily influenced by the Euro-prog work of such pioneers as Richard Pinhas (of Heldon), who made a cameo appearance playing guitar on the record’s opening track. (The collaboration between the two musicians would be revisited in the 2000 album Oblique Sessions, Vol. 2.)
Beginning in the early 1980s, with albums such as Logique du sens (1983), Comelade’s music went in a more tuneful direction, developing a style that mixed the repetitive tonal patterns of American minimalism, a mood of wistful nostalgia, and distinctive orchestrations that make heavy use of toy instruments. The extended jams of his early records gives way to quirky, laconic character pieces.
Throughout the 80s and 90s, Comelade released a prolific set of recordings as the bandleader of the Bel Canto Orquestra, a seven-piece group that juxtaposes the sound of cheap, plastic instruments with the more conventional piano, violin and guitar. With time, the sound of his music diverged from the gritty, one-take aesthetic of the earlier work into more polished compositions that occasionally skirt the border between new-age and film music—for instance, the lovely piano piece “Nocturn, à Joan Salvat-Papasseit” on Topographie anecdotique (1992).
Comelade’s diverse output is unified by an inventive melodic spark and the consistent pursuit of clear, simple arrangements and colorful orchestrations. Both of these qualities are on display in this buoyant overture to his 2006 album Espontex Sinfonia.
Played 80 time(s).
August 09, 2011, 11:44am
