En plus de Celer qu’elle formait avec son compagnon, Danielle Baquet-Long avait crééChubby Wolf, dont Dragon’s Eye grave aujourd’hui Los que no son gentos.
Parce que je n’ai pas écouté cette jeune femme de son vivant, le faire aujourd’hui me désole. Je ne peux que me rendre compte, en retard, de la façon dont elle envisageait la musique. Dans un mixeur bien à elle, elle mettait sa voix, une basse et des synthétiseurs, pour former une musique d’ambiance léchée. C’est la bande-son d’un voyage au désert en quatorze stations de variations climatiques en filigrane.
Tranquille et légère, cette musique n’est pas à emporter, mais à vivre sur place. On peut y méditer ou y rêver. Los que no son gentos est un terrain vague où l’on fait du sur-place. Le mouvement n’est pas de notre fait, il n’est pas le nôtre non plus mais celui de tout ce qui nous entoure. Comme on y est bien…
This is a posthumous release; sadly Danielle Baquet-Long (who recorded solo as Chubby Wolf as well as with the husband/wife duo Celer) passed away in the summer of 2009. By the time I had discovered that piece of information of the Dragon’s Eye website, I had listened to this disc four times – and the last piece of the puzzle snapped into place. This album, moreso than almost any record I’ve ever heard, tries to purposefully recede from every plane of existence. There are tons of records that are quiet, spacious, ephemerail, ambient, environmental – we could keep going and that’s even before we get a thesaurus involved. But this particular record has a feel to it that, to my ears, is unique: I am not sure how to say it but it almost seems to me like what Baquet-Long managed to do was to make a record that amplified every other sound that was in range, except her own – something is going on here more than just ‘this is a quiet record’ – though this is a pretty quiet record. This is not haunting, though; even with the added information of loss of life, which is always tragic and too soon regardless of a person’s age, there is nothing about this record that evokes or underscores loss. They say it is hard to write about music, and of course that is true. The strange thing for me is that part of me feels like I could write for a long, long while about this disc… but if you asked me to be succinct: this is the sound of an art studio that contains only blank canvases.