onsdag den 22. januar 2020

Madame Swann - S/T 

written by Balderus



A Dutch friend wondered yesterday whether I know that guy from the French neofolk act Pale Roses who has just released with his side-project Madame Swann that surreal eerie music piece eponymously called. I told her how ignorant about this I was and checked the Bandcamp link attached. First bars, first hit in the brain. The deeper the listening was, the greater the enthusiasm was growing. Eerie sound textures, inspired tunes from bygone times, Chopin-Satie-and-Debussy-oriented structures and this very special feeling of non-such when an undefined vaporous memory is invading your inner cloud, were randomly at work altogether.

Betimes, after the first musical sensations, you look through the information on the BC page and realize that all your impressions in the rough are not mere coincidence. Yes! You travel back to the 19th century and the birth years of the 20th. More specifically, you enter the era of Marcel Proust’s genius footprint. Madame Swann! This piece, every track of it, sounds like one of these delicious madeleines. Once you dig further to overtake this gallery of emotions, you read that the fellow distilled all this based on what his grand-mother composed back then in the 1910-20s… 


And the idea of Zeitgeist pops immediately up.

Do you feel you are flying back to those times when the modern world was emerging? When Art Nouveau was everywhere when you were on the brink of marching between established tradition and nascent utopias of modernity? This is normal!

Old times because all that I mentioned sooner and utopias of modernity (or dystopias?) because of the tones played. Clockwork The orange-textured soundtrack which brings this eeriness, this feeling of uncertainty you got when you are entering an era of faltering steps, in search of lost time and in hesitation before a change that cannot be overlooked, all at once. By listening to this piece, both timeless and suffusing it's tick-tock, you may stand right on the frontier of your defining self.

I was told by the musician that there could be more tunes, of course only if more madeleines are discovered. The idea of a physical format has emerged, maybe to set a landmark on Swann’s way and allow the satisfaction of time regained.

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