Aux Solitudes

Aux Solitudes is certainly a play on words on Purcell (O solitude), but this album of classic instrumental and post-rock returns to a serious theme, that is an essential, and which does not consist of a consensual complaint on the planet’s degradation but instead, of an evocation of a major challenge. The announcement of the death of God has turned us into orphans. It’s up to us to fully pay the consequences.

Intertwinning of styles, borrowing from the past and prospective sounds characterize this new album in the color black, twinkling (like the vibrations of a painting by Pierre Soulages), whose lyricism is paradoxical for hope spurts forth on a base of desolation. Mixing the acoustic sources and electronics, with a shivering lightness and a frenetic pulsing, Jean-Philippe Goude invents this great music which abolishes frontiers. This music is to be listened to and looked at.

The singularity of L’Ensemble Jean-Philippe Goude is a magical union where a quintet of strings, piano, Martenon wave, mandolin, woodwinds and some heavenly voices, composing a cinematic universe like a film that projects dreams, doubts, nighttime moods, and the perspective of a path which is ours to draw. Here is a majestic work, profound in which it is impossible to lose oneself. It speaks as much to the fans of baroque music as to those souls moved by the minimalism of Moondog and Phil Glass, and to those who are touched by the fantasies of Erik Satie; as to those who are the most ardent admirers of Arvo Pärt’s diatonic music. For anyone turned on by Gabriel Fauré or definitely seduced by the elegies of Robert Wyatt, Aux Solitudes is an album of contrasts which goes beyond its predecessors.

As for the text recited by Laurence Masliah and Jean-Philippe Goude, sung by Isaure Equilbey and Paulin Bundgen, our young boy of 11 years of age has just inscribed a capital work in the marble of music on the move.This is one of the works that one will listen to with the sole purpose and the sole pleasure of traversing life (without the help of the afficionados of Lully and Sufjan Stenvens) while envisioning one’s present and future on a sensitive mood. Sensitive, Jean-Philippe Goude is assuredly, like a string which would be pulled by a wounded heart and the smile of an eternal child who doesn’t know that life dies.