The French-Norwegian quartet Dans les arbres features idiosyncratic, experimental musicians – French clarinetist Xavier Charles and Norwegian pianist-electronics player Christian Wallumrød, guitarist Ivar Grydeland and percussionist Ingar Zach – has been constructing its collective sound and spontaneous group-composing based on unusual combinations of airy, wooden, metallic sounds, prepared strings and tampered drum heads, unorthodox, extended techniques and subtle electronics, over the last twenty years.
L’album vert is the fifth «official» album of Dans les arbres (five more live recordings are available only on the Bandcamp page of the quartet). It is a compilation of asynchronous steps for an imaginary dance floor, recorded in the autumn of 2022, poetically described by the quartet: «a strange but amusing place were eyes listen in and ears peek around. Glass breaks, someone stumbles, something always happens. The dancers inevitably hop to moments of tension of which they free themselves again and again». The beautiful cover artwork of Brazilian painter Marina Rheingantz, «Portrait of a Sound» (Óleo sobre tela), part of her series of paintings, Pansori, a Soundscape of the 21st Century), intensifies this elusive, poetic aesthetics.
The unique instrumentation of Dans les arbres – clarinet, prepared piano, electronics, pedal steel guitar, gran cassa, percussion and vibrating membranes – contribute to the enigmatic, sparse sonic palette of L’album vert, enhanced by experimental recording techniques. The first two pieces are titled – «les yeux écoutent» (eyes listen) and «les oreilles voient» (ears see) seek an elusive sense of synaesthesia, and suggest open-ended textures that float in an ever-expanding space, adapting fragile touch-and-go dynamics, accompanied by distant, almost industrial pulse, as if the four musicians communicate with their abstract sounds through the air in between.
The third and last piace, the 22-minute «une danse imaginaire» offered a more structured texture, fitting, indeed, an imaginary dance or soundscape. Here Dans les arbres offers a strange, dream-like journey in a garden of colorful, vivid sounds and fragmented, vibrating paths. Just like in the suggestive cover painting of Rheingantz, Dans les arbres imagines mysterious, rhythmic dances on an empty dance floor.
Eyal Hareuveni
Xavier Charles (clarinet), Ivar Grydeland (pedal steel guitar), Christian Wallumrød (prepared piano, electronics), Ingar Zach (gran cassa, percussion, vibrating membranes)
