MUSETTE - Datum

"Patience is the virtue of the strong", as the old saying goes. Swedish composer and pianist Joel Danell, aka Musette, knows this well: over the course of several years, he lovingly collected on cassette tapes the piano compositions that flowed from his mind, noting down the recording date on each one and giving life to a sort of diary that crystallizes landscapes and thoughts into music.

Reworked with the help of acoustic instruments (violin, guitar, melodica, accordion, Dobro) and enriched with various field recordings, the pages of this diary have finally been published in "Datum", Musette's debut album, released in a limited run by the newborn Swedish label Tona Serenad.

Pausing to watch the spectacle of nature through an open window: this seems to be Danell's starting point, as in his tracks he turns the pastel colours of an impressionist painting into music, paying particular attention to the different details of the landscape - water running over stones, bees buzzing around a hive, little birds chirping among the branches. These and other sounds become precious allies in building acoustic sketches of strong evocative power, where piano scores worthy of the most inspired Tiersen intertwine with an enveloping swirl of accordion and guitars, while Brita Westerman's quavering whistling traces light, enchanted melodies over the songs.

The echoes are manifold, some even "highbrow" (from Satie's minimalism to Debussy's exotic nocturnes), but the freshness of the compositions keeps Danell's music from being easily pigeonholed into narrow, limiting schemes.

The succession of tracks, never too dissimilar in attitude and melodic feel, sweeps the listener into a time vortex where the sepia-toned Paris of Amelie blurs and overlaps with the black and white of nouvelle vague films: Joel Danell's themes would make the ideal soundtrack for François Truffaut's masterpiece, "Jules et Jim", amid bucolic idylls, bike rides along the Seine, picnics in the green, houses immersed in nature, quiet and melancholy madness.

The freshness of the melodies on "Datum" sometimes even makes one wonder what would have become of that extraordinary, unsettling film had the French director had the chance to meet Danell and choose him instead of his trusted Georges Delerue - though it's clear and obvious that the Musette project could never have come to light without such illustrious predecessors and sources of inspiration.

Background music, no doubt, but one that already possesses its own evocative force, at times impalpable and ethereal, seemingly conjuring pre-existing images, like those of a film or a painting, or, more simply, serving beautifully as a backdrop to a dream or to peacefully daydreaming while watching the shifting movements of clouds in the sky.

A work full of grace and generous with sonic delights, "Datum" is a small album, but rich in substance, simple but never banal, light but never superfluous, and it reveals Danell as a highly refined composer who, with an ear turned to the past and a heart turned to the south of France, gifts us a reserved triumph of melancholy, nostalgia and longing.

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14/12/2009