Thomas Bel is a true man of the fall, the time of year when the dead take pleasure listening to the footsteps of the living crossing their graves. Initially inspired by the German poet Johannes Bobrowski and comparing his work to Richard Skelton, Christian Fennesz and Erik Skodvin, the Toulouse-based Bel serves a woodland episcopate of melancholy, “a controlled fragility” of layers combining field recordings, guitar, piano, cello, flute and electronics.
Innerly is a rich, multivalent tapestry, an abstract of autumnal emotions all the more evocative for being crafted with such restraint. Though he sings, it’s not so much a singer’s album as a bronze and dun-coloured impressionism into which occasionally floats a tentative voice, one of the many leaves of the forest. All sounds, from the sweetly melodic and ambient to the concrete, except the droning cello on “Pâle,” have been played and spindled by Bel into the branches of the trees that surround him, both literally and metaphorically. Smooth as river rocks and rough hewn as a badger’s hollow, the music merges so closely with the environment that it defies categorization as anything but natural poetry.
Also available on vinyl, the CD version contains a triptych of bonus tracks in a long, languid denouement.
Compiling a catalogue of the work of Dutch-born French painter Piet Moget (b 1928), its editor wanted to include a compact disc featuring the twenty-minute piece for electric guitar and bow that Bel played at the gallery launch. Moget’s big, neo-Rothkovian canvases are, in the words of Bel, where the sea and sky are one space, canvases “drowned into layers and layers,” work based on repetition in mystical sync with nature.
Thus his Hommage à Piet Moget sounds like a harmonica sun slowly fingering itself over a deep cello horizon. Bel subsequently asked Laurent Bardèche to perform a real-time remix of the piece and Bardèche gingerly opens it up like the flowers, and then the entire garden, responding to the sunrise, like an orchestra to its conductor. I dare say both complement the visual artist impeccably.
Both releases are available on Annexia.
