Pagan Dances - Thierry Zaboitzeff
In just twenty minutes, Thierry Zaboitzeff sets the scene once again with Pagan Dances for his nocturnal worlds, whose uneasy contours he has been drawing for more than forty-five years now. Let's remember the first recordings of the group Art Zoyd and his Symphony for the day when the cities burn. In other words, the chronicle of a foretold collapse that we will bring closer to Génération sans futur or Espaces inquiets some time later. One shudders just reading them, one is overcome by fever when listening to them. In any case, the vibration is strong, almost telluric.
The multi-instrumentalist (but first a bassist and cellist) seems to be particularly active for some time. The proof is Aria Primitiva in 2019 or Professional Stranger just a year ago, two albums I had the opportunity to report on at the time of their release. Essential evocations insofar as this musician seems to me to be one of those who have succeeded in inventing their own universe. It is safe to assume that there is indeed a "Planet Zaboitzeff" somewhere, very close to us.
Twenty minutes, yes, that is to say a fraction of a second on the scale of a lifetime, to express the essence of a musician inhabited as in the early days, through an idiom adorned with the colours of a music whose torments would be those of a journey in the direction of the great mystery, an initiatory journey punctuated by encounters which you don't know if they should force you to move away under the influence of a sudden fear or arouse your curiosity. Because this music is human, be sure, it is the ripe fruit of the heart and soul. It is certainly cerebral, but also carnal, not to say sensual. These "pagan dances" are not joyful, it is true. They question our world, which we know is too often cold and implacable. However, they do in fact take the form of dances, intoxicating and irresistible, in a haunted choreography whose movements are carried by a piano with Bartokian accents and a guitar that does not deny its Frippian aestheticism. The title composition - about which I allow myself to think that certain passages recall the work of Art Zoyd's sister group, Univers Zéro - stretches for a quarter of an hour, multiplying the ambushes, the changes of trajectory and altitude, combining the sonorities. One could speak of contemporary electro-acoustic chamber music or technoid rock where samples and synthetic strings flourish. This is only the outline of a wording of what is received, in the first place. It is above all a journey about which our friend Thierry Moreau (who once again signs the album's visuals, bravo to him) says with great acuity that he hears: "music from an imaginary film, a post-dystopian Polovtsian Dance ballet".
The conclusion of this bewitching (and inevitably too short) disc takes the form of an enigmatic ballad just as nocturnal as 'Pagan Dances', 'The Legend of NaYmA'. A piano and a cello can be heard over which a voice declaims words whose meaning escapes us, but which we only need to feel to understand them. Behind this apparent mystery is undoubtedly the definition of an organic language, as Thierry Zaboitzeff himself explained to me in a recent exchange: "I built up this whole dark atmosphere between percussion, cello and piano and then improvised with my voice, letting myself be guided by my orchestra, if I may say so, and finding different articulations, different sounds, different emotions, onomatopoeia... Recording after recording, I collect the sounds that touch me the most and I end up taking a piece of this or that track and I rewrite a text that suits me emotionally in the situation... And I fix the whole thing, then I rewrite it properly, it's not a language, but I like to think that it may be a forgotten language very intimately linked to the sounds produced in my composition.
Everything is said, life is here.
Musician: Thierry Zaboitzeff (cello, bass, keyboards, percussion, programming, voice, composition).
Titles: Pagan Dances (14:46) | La légende de NaYmA (4:50).
Label: imd zab-music (24 September 2021)
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