BRUNO DUPLANT - Athanor

Four years after his collaboration with Julien Heraud, Bruno Duplant returns to Nicola Quiriconi's Dissipatio with a new solo work that borrows elements of alchemical discipline to define its conceptual framework. Athanor is the furnace that distills and purifies matter, the means to reach the Philosopher's Stone, but it's also a symbol of the inextinguishable fire of artistic creation. It's no surprise, then, to find an itinerary of expansive scope – over eighty minutes – made up of saturated, largely impenetrable soundscapes.

Sound is treated as matter in constant, slow evolution, a web of drones and reverbs that traces a three-part flow, fixed onto a double release. A compact trajectory that demands the standards of deep listening in order to be approached properly. It's a horizontal texture that advances quietly, gradually emerging from the initial drones of "Sublimation", passing through oblique, subtly dissonant phases, before arriving at electroacoustic expanses intersected by intrusions of strings and brass. The resulting tension and sense of unease evoke atmospheres typical of 20th-century avant-garde.

In "Éternité" everything grows even heavier, and the persistence of the sound edges toward the absolute, virtually negating the passage of time. Its more than twenty-three minutes shape a monolithic aural space, certainly functional to the work's concept, but hard to fully take in. Staying locked into the listening experience requires the will to venture into a forbidding territory entirely centred on its own immersive power.

It's "Albedo" instead – a single track that fills the whole second disc – that offers the most dynamic and engaging structure, enriched by the ripples of Karen Jebane/Golem Mecanique's Boite à Bourdons, which modulates the sonic fabric until its final dissolution into silence. An intense journey, but not for everyone.

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01/05/2026