MELAINE DALIBERT - Ressac

Contemporary music has instilled in me an obsession with time: the lost and rediscovered time of nostalgia, the time we lack (or, as Enrico Ghezzi would put it, the time to which we are lacking), the time we feel the need to put to good use, to render "complete". I find myself increasingly drawn to music — many wouldn't even call it that — which makes an excessive, out-of-the-ordinary, perhaps even unreasonable use of time, because I recognize in it the utopian desire to replace it, duplicate it, embrace its immaterial extension.

Breton pianist Melaine Dalibert is a spiritual disciple of minimalist Tom Johnson, the American composer who emigrated to France and was himself a student of Morton Feldman. The thread of a suspended time, no longer perceived distinctly, intertwines with the symmetries of mathematics, the abstract discipline par excellence, giving shape to modular scores whose generative processes could go on indefinitely, as in the absolute reflection achieved by the ambient music of Brian Eno.

The long meditation of "Ressac" proceeds at the pace of a single note at a time, in a fragile yet continuous chain: literally the "undertow", the breaking of the musical gesture upon a boundless surface that knows neither past nor future — a piano, precisely, objectified in the same way as Feldman's monumental compositions.

But the extraordinary revelation lies precisely in the fact that it is time, and time alone, that imparts a vague, languid feeling to the notes — pure tones that barely brush against one another, without following tried-and-tested progressions of the kind that would openly mark the composition as melancholic.

The same happens, at a more regular and slightly more sustained pace, in the opening track "En Abyme", an expression that likewise refers to the conscious repetition of a fundamental unit of meaning, the one within which an entire complex narrative can be resolved. A game of mirrors in which, moreover, the unfolding of Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel" returns, the perfect geometry of a song of the fully pacified soul.

In the work of the South American poet Derek Walcott (1930-2017), the lapping of the sea and the breaking of waves on the shore are the only constant in the ever-changing scenery that is the history of mankind, from Homer's epics to today's massacres of migrants. Time exists only in relation to us, since everything is always (and has always been) present.

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04/07/2017