Exotic, incendiary, outrageous. Truffaz’s intoxicating brass sorcery looms above and flows through Murcof’s surging, spiraling and throbbing ocean of electronic abstraction.
The sonic love affair between Swiss-born French Blue Note veteran jazz trumpeter Erik Truffaz and Mexican ambient electronica artist Murcof, had already produced unique results before. In 2008 they released their debut collaborative effort, Mexico, a mini album that fuses their distinctive powers into a rather organic sounding atmospheric hybrid. Before that, in 2006, the two worked with famous tabla player Talvin Singh as a genre-crossing live trio. Being Human Being, which was inspired and enhanced by the striking work of Enki Bilal, the French comics artist and filmmaker, is Truffaz and Murcof’s sophomore studio-based collaborative effort, an exotic, incendiary and outrageous work that carries a lot of production/studio wizardry, but also a seductive aura of improvisation which glows throughout. Truffaz’s intoxicating brass sorcery looms above and flows through Murcof’s surging, spiraling and throbbing ocean of electronic abstraction.
The press release of the album is quite lengthy, it imposes certain images and in a way tells you how the music should be interpreted and experienced. Fortunately, the great thing about instrumental music, is that you can ignore everything the artists and labels say, and develop your own natural unique relationship with it. There is one thing though, which is undeniable in this case: the highly gloomy and at times twisted, savage nature of the music. It pulls me into the dystopian desolations of a parallel universe, my view is panoramic and from up high, the motion is slow, the skies are gray and broken. Around the breaks there are strange, purple luminous shades, and there’s smoke behind mountains in the horizon. The hectic “Warhol,” “Human Being” and “Chaos” are definitely the more exciting parts of the journey, but the lighter and more dreamy parts, like “Origin of the world” and “Skin” are not less intense and alluring.
Being Human Being is definitely not an easily digested affair, and definitely not background music. One has to be in a certain mood in order to experience it, and ready to dive in and submit. I shake off the words of the press release from my mind before diving in, but they have certainly affected my listening experience to some extent. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy what the music does to me, I just wonder if my experience with it would have been the same had I not read the press release. I guess I’ll never know. One thing is sure, Being Human Being contains plenty of soul-stirring and mind-bending moments that stretch and blur sonic boundaries.
If you are now reading this review, and my words managed to turn you onto this album, that’s great, that’s the whole point of a review, spreading the word, turning people onto something new. For some people, sometimes even a quick look at the artwork (which in this case very attractive) is enough to make them check out the music (myself included). Now, just forget what you read here and just see what the music does to you, because as someone once said, and I repeatedly quote: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture—it’s really a stupid thing to want to do.”
Being Human Being is out via Mundo and available on Two Gentlemen. [Bandcamp]
