VICE/dMute features and reviews 'Break'

VICE/dMute (France)

Translated from French

Some disparate notes are hesitant at first to start, or at least to form something that would be akin to a harmony. They are joined by a breath, then a short song, by floating tablecloths, then a distant breath becoming squalls clashing. The long composition Seiche (below) opens masterfully this album and we recognize well in this subtle hatching of sounds this particular attention brought not on the music in itself but on what makes it born from nothing, nothing . "The vase gives a shape to the void, and the music to silence" said Georges Braque.

Half of the Tokyo duo Illuha formed with the Japanese Tomoyoshi Date, the American Corey Fuller returns this time alone on the 12k label with a mastered work with a care always meticulous by Taylor Deupree. Break leaves the piano as centrally located as in Illuha, the instrument seeming to be the heart innervating all the organs of a proteiform ambient album. Sometimes sensory in what he has to offer us in terms of immersive sound sculptures, sometimes emotional when he opens the abstraction of his fluctuating compositions to clearer and more distinct melodies, this album evokes as much Ryuichi Sakamoto with whom he previously collaborated (Lamentation) as scattered notes of Arvo Pärt's Für Alina (Look into the Heart of Light, The Silence and its whirling curls). Break offers the listener a form of wandering melancholy never lead, welcomes him into his cottony refuge in the enveloping heat and invites him to make a "break" ("break").

Corey Fuller's new album is above all a remarkable piece of piano sound, continuing the work of the Illuha duo and sometimes reaching a few heights when it manages to capture this double aspect, dear to any instrument: to be on the one hand a transmitter of sounds, notes, melodies, therefore transmitters of emotions, and secondly to be an object having its own body with all the asperities, the material and internal mechanisms sometimes defective that it includes. These seem sometimes worn out by time as evidenced by the crackle of the magnificent final A Handful of Dust (below), a wreck of engulfed composition that embellishes and gradually moves as it rises. As for what is decidedly broken or fractured, the composer decides to erect a hymn (the beautiful A Hymn for the Broken).

It is certainly the great wealth of Break to be an album finding the right balance between emotional intensity and sensory fragility, as much of the beauty of a music knowing how to capture the elusive as the existence of all these porosities and these cracks that shape and give life to it.