French, Lille-based sas player, flutist and plastic artist Sakina Abdou is a member of the local and fertile musicians collective Muzzix. She explores free improvisation, experimental and contemporary music with Eve Risser’s Red Desert Orchestra and Raymond Boni and collaborated with Satoko Fujii, Michael Pisaro and Anthony Pateras. Goodbye Ground is her first solo saxophone album (she plays the alto and tenor saxes) in which she invites herself into herself, centers herself and anchors herself in her own language and summons the multiple influences that have nourished her.

Goodbye Ground was recorded in Abdou’s home studio between April and July 2022. It features her naked, raw and tangible sax sound, without effects or artifice, in an almost macroscopic close-up sound recording. The album is designed as a triptych and structured in three parts. The first one, «The Day I Became a Floor» establishes Abdou’s warm sound and sonic architecture – horizontal with a great focus on each note, but with many stretched veins.

The second, 12-minute title piece offers a different attitude, raw, stubborn and restless but with many offsprings, some are melodic and vulnerable but others are abstract and distorted as if Abdou was deconstructing her language into its basic elements. The five-part «Planting Chairs» completes this intimate and impressive journey and returns full circle to the constant shape-shifting sonic architecture of the opening piece, with Abdou’s imaginative language, unique way of building and releasing the tension, commanding technique and captivating performance.

Eyal Hareuveni

Sakina Abdou (as, ts)