Tape enthusiast from an early age, fiddler and twiddler with loops, synths and field recordings alongside his trusted guitar and effect pedals, Daou brings to it much previous in soundscapery and drone, lo-fi ambient color—acoustic instrument and found object artefacts…
Daou works in architecture, photography and collage
“How many times have we walked or driven past another human being living a shattered life? Random, anonymous, but for their fleeting presence as we pass by, how often do we take time to ponder what brought them to that point and whether they once were happy or could be again?” asks Beirut-born Paris-based musician and multi-disciplinary artist, Georges Daou, who has done just that, the testimony borne in Reverie. “A fig tree stands up the hill, surrounded by a herd of cattle chanting melodies and playing the chimes…” he adds for good measure, obliquely raising the poetic stakes.
Through a blend of pastoral field recordings and ambient sound drawn from guitars and pedals, synths and loops, Daou immerses us in his head cinema, soundtracking the story of ‘a penurious old lady’ a distant memory of whom retained from childhood in the Lebanese mountains. That she lived in an abandoned house with her cow having been ill-treated by her siblings after her husband’s death we know, a lot whose sadness Daou dwells on less than wondering about her past life and hoping in earlier years sometime, she enjoyed her life somehow, and the potential for it to have taken a different, happier, course. “This is a tribute to this random human being whose life didn’t matter and whose memory is fading over the years. It’s a celebration of her life and a fiction of what could it be.“
As well as music, Daou works in architecture, photography and collage, these finding semiotic parallel in his use of field recordings from the French countryside to frame the music’s narrative drive—footfall crunch on gravel, breeze through the leaves, distant bell chime. These function like a mise-en-scene, literally putting you into the scene, the sad story of our lady—a nobody maybe, but still a human being. This humanity finds expressive analog in Reverie’s sonic sensibility. Tape enthusiast from an early age, fiddler and twiddler with loops, synths and field recordings alongside his trusted guitar and effect pedals, Daou brings to it much previous in soundscapery and drone, lo-fi ambient color—acoustic instrument and found object artefacts, building on Subliminal (2020) and Sanctuary (2022), furthering his tape and field work, granular ‘scapes pared to sparest, in layered parallel and recursive series. Culture note: out of Sardinia Lᴏɴᴛᴀɴᴏ Series, a division of Rohs!, is curated by Andrea Porcu, lontano (It.) meaning distant, far-off, striking an apposite keynote for Reverie, recorded as much of it was in the French outdoors with Daou’s trusty dictaphones, seeking to capture something of the sound of a past long gone. Lontano …
Reverie is available on Rohs! Lontano Series. [Bandcamp]
