It is, indeed, a record featuring collaborators from all around the world, from jazz musicians, to classical, to spoken poetry, there is a lot to explore, with each track also being an enjoyable experience—it’s not just variety for the sake of it, there’s a lot of effort everywhere here!
Varied and expressive
Jean-François Charles closes out 2024 with a series of collaborations presented all in Tenebrae. Nine tracks composed one on one by Charles himself and another collaborator, each piece having its own performer, creating a wide array of different performance styles and timbres, as each track showcases the instrument the participant brought in. With them, Charles rearranges the live playing, utilizing feedback and looping even the shortest of bits to provide added texture to each piece; while that may make it seems like he’s often taking a secondary role as the performers solo over his background ambience, that’s not totally true, as it’s especially great when you get these brief moments in which you can tell who’s now following whom, these kind of transitions in which the roles begin to reverse.
Charles himself also does some pretty substantial rearranging of the live playing, there isn’t just looping or harmonization to match with the playing on top, sometimes there’s a strong separation between the two and other times the transformations Charles experiments with are so drastic that they vary from percussive clicks and thuds to ominous ambience.
Other times, the two performers go hand in hand with each other. One example is my favorite piece, “On the Mount of Olives,” which is really beautiful. The setar from Roshandel starts off delicate and shy, and the breezy background ambience amplifies that feel of calm even more. The atmosphere thickens, as the playing gets more and more melodic, focusing on some well defined phrases instead of the short and loose melodies presented at the beginning, and the accents in each of these phrases make the playing really dynamic, there’s a lot of vigor for sure. Intensity builds up greatly thanks to that, but not in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat, the piece simply seems to come more and more alive as it goes, it oozes energy as it progresses. The second half is particularly lovely, as Charles rearranges Roshandel’s playing not to provide atmosphere, rather to create background harmonies that make it seems like the piece has suddenly become a setar duet.
Background harmonies ::
“We Have Seen” is also one of the best composed tracks on the LP, starting off with a rotten atmosphere and slowly blossoming into a really hard hitting melancholic piece. It goes from ugly, clicky textures and really unnerving screeches to a really heartfelt performance. The change is not drastic, it is pretty meticulous actually, as you get one of those transitions I hinted at earlier. While for the first part of the piece Cottet-Dumoulin seems to follow Charles unnerving direction by adding inharmonious bow sweeps, there’s a moment of peace where Cottet-Dumoulin is left on his own, and his playing is now smooth and melodic; at this moment, Charles comes in to back him up and harmonize his playing, shifting the direction of the piece totally, both from the standpoint of who’s leading now and from the fact that the track is now showing its more pleasant side. This change is one of my favorite moments on the record, but that’s not to say that the piece doesn’t occasionally represent its spine tingling side as well.
“Judas” is the highlight of the second nocturne, and is one of the titles that made me realize all the others have religious connections to them as well. My ignorance on anything related to religion is so mighty that I couldn’t even try to see if there’s a tale being told all along, but you may try if your knowledge isn’t as lacking as mine is. Regardless, “Judas” is one of the more stressful cuts on the record, as it amps up its intensity in a decisive way, unlike the previously talked about “On the Mount of Olives,” which always keeps itself pretty; here, the playing is erratic once it gets going, offering few moments to catch a breath, but even more intense may be Charles’ rebranding of Sordet’s alto, utilizing all the clicks from the sax and blending them with some thick drones to provide a background that’s so strong it’s not even really background anymore. I’m always a big fan of the exploitation sax players manage to achieve out of the percussive capabilities of the instrument, and it shows most when the piece happens to be solo—a duet in this case, but close enough, as rhythm is still a very strong component here.
Its atmosphere never settles ::
Nocturne 3 opens up with two more distressing tracks, which don’t leave a great impression on me due to the fact that they seem to recycle ideas in previous pieces, but then closes with another highlight, “The elders,” the only purely electronic track on the LP. A glitchy, unpredictable, and really textured piece, “The elders” definitely stands out due to how unique its timbres are, which is to be expected considering that it’s the only track that makes us of a synthesizer as its lead instrument. Its atmosphere never settles, if anything this is one of the cuts that focuses least on ambience and really hammers it with its erratic and constantly skipping electronics, it has the right to call itself glitch any day of the week.
It also doesn’t seem to follow a precise direction like a lot of other tracks, and though I suppose improvisation is a big component in any of these tracks as Charles is likely figuring out how to keep up as the pieces go on, this track in particular is so unpredictable that is seems improvised in its entirety.
While at the beginning I did state that there are nine tracks on this record, two bonus tracks also happen to fit in, and they’re the only ones to feature vocals. Though I do like “La bête” more, I have to admit that “The Sea” is more memorable between the two; the former has better instrumentation, but the latter leaves quite a mark with its free-styled poetry—not that it is actually off the dome, at least I don’t think so, but it does pack so many rhymes that it seems to give up meaning in favor of smoothness sometimes, to the point where if it had a boom bap beat behind it you may as well call it abstract hip hop. It that doesn’t at least spark a bit of curiosity, then maybe the lines “Did I say ‘anus’ in ‘Uranus’, are you homophobic? — Relax, sit down, you’re all a bit gay — It means to be happy, I say; my first name is Jhe” will? I hope so, because it’s definitely a memorable closer.
As varied and as expressive as most of the album is, it’s not shocking to say that it goes well from start to finish. There are a couple tracks in the second half that do seem like ideas you’ve heard prior on the LP, or some like “My Friend” that stagnate a bit after multiple listens, but the beauty of the album really lies in its diversity.
It is, indeed, a record featuring collaborators from all around the world, from jazz musicians, to classical, to spoken poetry, there is a lot to explore, with each track also being an enjoyable experience—it’s not just variety for the sake of it, there’s a lot of effort everywhere here!
Throughout his career, Jean-François Charles has collaborated with artists from various worlds, from Maurice Merle of the Organization in Search of an Imaginary Folklore (ARFI, Lyon) to the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu, and the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the Missa brevis Abbaye de Thélème (2023) and the Agnus Dei music video, he and soprano Anika Kildegaard gave a new reading of beautiful French poems. In the award-winning Jamshid Jam (2022), he sampled and remixed the Iranian setar virtuoso Ramin Roshandel. Other highlights include the opera Grant Wood in Paris, commissioned by Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre (premiered 2019), and the musical chemistry show designed with scientific glassblower Benjamin Revis (2018).
Mixing by Frédéric Apffel
Analog mastering by Jean-Charles Herrmann
Picture by Ramin Roshandel
Graphic design by Marc Dannenhoffer
Tenebrae is available on New Flore Music. [Bandcamp]
