Genre: Ambient / Experimental

01 Derriére...
02 Calme
03 Echappé
04 Près de l’arbre
05 Je ne te vois plus
06 Affleurement
07 Les nuages flottent
08 Lueur
09 Là
10 Partir loin

Strange haunting floating otherworldly melodies from a parallel yet oddly familiar dimension, sculpted from guitar, melodica, carillon, piano, organ and field recordings, and then finely chiselled into their final shape on a laptop. This is the art of the French sonic-sculptor Gabriel Hernandez; his creations give us a passport into that other dimension of liquid reality, formed from formlessness, continually effervescing, coagulating, dissolving and resolving into shapes and colours as yet uninvented, unseen and unlooked for. A world where the solid qualities of space and silence hold as much power as those of sound and structure.

Here is a world where matter is constantly created and reformed, but never destroyed – images, feelings and forms are as ephemeral and fleeting as the silkiest gossamer of a spider’s thread, where coruscant notes sparkle and glitter like flashes of living light, where touching dissolves but in an instant is reformed into some new wonder. Here also is a world where the sky is forever the right shade of blue and the grass is also forever the right shade of green, remembered from summers of distant childhood; and where memories take on the clothing and strength of reality and retain their power to move. Notes burst out of spaces filled with the lightest of breezes and are borne away gently. A place where even mundane sounds take on an air of the fantastic and phatasmagorical.

Hernandez’s ability to lift you out of the present and project you into new realities and possibilities is remarkable. Even a simple familiar plucked guitar figure (such as on ‘Près de l’arbre’ – By the Tree) summons you away from the mundane that surrounds the everyday and transports you to an Otherplace, a place that lets you drift lazily high up with the clouds (‘Les nuages flottent’ – The Clouds Float). Summer rains drench everything with a watery varnish and saturate the eye with even more intense light and colour (‘Là’ –There) but with the return of the sun comes the parallel return of the birds (‘Partir loin’ – The Long Parting?) and the sorrow of leaving such beautiful and amenable surroundings. It is almost a sorrow in itself that this CD has to come to an end.

This is both an uplifting and a moving experience - certainly propelling me back over the years to the days when a six week summer holiday seemed like a lifetime and every experience was tinged with novelty and wonder. That feeling gently weaves itself around the ten compositions and binds it together beautifully. The more and more that I delve into the vast mine that is underground music the more and more treasures that I discover – and Gabriel Hernandez can surely count himself amongst them.