ONE MUST HAVE CHAOS INSIDE TO GIVE BIRTH TO A DANCING STAR (vinyl)

Description

By consciously reconnecting with the radicality of the improvised gesture that, twenty years ago, sealed their partnership, the three comrades of Das Kapital sign with "One Must Have Chaos Inside to Give Birth to a Dancing Star" a landmark album in the form of a poetic manifesto of great lyrical intensity, transfiguring the muffled tensions of the contemporary world through the prism of an instant collective harmony of miraculous sensitivity. It may perhaps have been somewhat forgotten, so much so that over the years the group Das Kapital found its voice and cultivated its difference by most often unfolding its libertarian poetics embracing the full spectrum of modern jazz and contemporary experimental music, from pre-existing thematic material (whether drawn from the fundamentally "impure" art of the German composer Hanns Eisler, blurring the boundaries between popular tradition and the avant-garde, from the vast repertoire of melodies belonging to the French tradition in all its forms, or from original compositions) - but the trio was formed and established itself at the turn of the 2000s in a register that unambiguously belonged to improvised music, in the broadest and freest sense of the term. Coming from very diverse aesthetic backgrounds, and already enriched by personal journeys each singularly traversing a European music scene then in full creative ferment in its desire for generalized hybridization, the Dane Hasse Poulsen, the German Daniel Erdmann and the Frenchman Edward Perraud invented together, from their very first concerts, a highly spontaneous and totally open music, both in its influences and in its formal choices. "It was magnetic between us right away," Hasse Poulsen recalls. "We started playing without any preconceived concept, without the project of fitting into any particular style - with only the desire to cross our experiences and see what would come of it!" "If something singular and personal emerged immediately," Daniel Erdmann adds, "it wasn't thought out. It happened only in and through playing." Breaking with a certain dogmatism of generative improvised music, ideologically wary of pulse, melody and more generally any element of language referring closely or remotely to tradition, the young internationalist brigade, far from wiping the slate clean, immediately distinguished itself by embracing and freely mixing in its iconoclastic music all the more or less subliminal references passing through the crucible of its authentically collective discourse. "We forbade ourselves nothing," sums up Edward Perraud. "If, over the course of improvisation, a melody, a rhythm or an allusion to a particular style arose, whether it was a metal riff or an explicit reference to free jazz, it was never a superficial borrowing, it was the music that generated it, and we welcomed it without taboo, as the fruit of a collective unconscious that the alchemy between us had managed to bring forth." Totally in tune with the spirit of the times, conscientiously working to abolish all forms of boundaries between learned and popular music while fully taking advantage of the originality of a tightrope-walking instrumentation combining guitar, saxophone and drums, Das Kapital gradually laid the aesthetic, poetic and political foundations of "a mini democracy in action, fragile and strong at the same time" and, by placing melody back at the heart of its project through a handful of inspired records, imposed on the European improvised music scene the profound originality of a deceptively simple and authentically free universe, combining uninhibited formal inventiveness with constant lyrical power. - - Twenty years have passed since this emergence and, after not only accumulating records together but also, each on their own, becoming involved in the most varied and ambitious projects, the three "masterminds" of Das Kapital felt the need for a kind of "return to the source" in the form of a clarification and a great regenerative gesture. "We suggested to Label Bleu that we lock ourselves in the studio for five days, without thematic material or any kind of preparation," explains Edward Perraud, "the aim being to improvise in a form of total freedom, in order to capture in real time the energies that today drive us both individually and collectively!" 41 improvisations thus came into being over three intense days of recording - of which 7, after a long process of listening, sifting and settling, were ultimately retained to give shape to this new record of extraordinary freshness and maturity combined! "The idea was precisely to rediscover this freshness in the sound, which one realizes, the further one goes in music, constitutes the most mysterious and probably the most quintessential aspect of creation," Perraud explains - "I think that from this point of view, our goal has been achieved: this record, by reconnecting with the completely improvised spirit of our beginnings, manages to capture without the slightest filter the music we make together today!" "Exactly," adds Hasse Poulsen, "it's improvised music but with today's energy and in the end, it sounds completely different from twenty years ago. Because not only have the times changed, but so have we. We have a level of real-time analysis of our music as it is being made that, both individually and collectively, has developed considerably. It's a bit as if we were the first witnesses to the music we make, and that inevitably generates new forms and new kinds of energy. We're less in brilliance, ironic distancing, iconoclastic violence - much more in logics of alloying, weaving, as if it were a matter of bringing together in the same shared discourse everything we have accumulated over time in knowledge and experience." Recorded under live conditions, in a form of intimacy inducing very subtle collective dynamics in a dreamlike register fully awake to the senses, this vibratile, tense, deep, complex, powerfully introspective music appears throughout to be traversed by a paradoxical form of serenity, even softness, founded on an understanding and complicity between the three musicians that is truly miraculous! Always very free in its shared gesture, resolutely open to the unexpected, and at the same time extraordinarily tightly held formally to the point of often giving the impression of being composed, this long suite benefited from a genuine sound-scenography work by sound engineer Maïkôl Seminatore, the trio's faithful partner since its beginnings... "These are the most natural takes we kept in the end, the ones that best conveyed the overall tone of the session," confides Daniel Erdmann. "There were no edits, the timings were scrupulously respected to reflect the dramaturgy specific to each improvisation, but Maïkôl spent hours in post-production working on framing effects and magnifications on certain details which, in the end, decisively contribute to the very particular atmosphere of the session and to the final form taken by the music." "We may never have heard the alchemy between us so well," sums up Edward Perraud, "the way we pass the ball to one another in a form of letting go based on great mutual trust. The impulse can start from a guitar chord, reverberate in the sound of the saxophone and then continue with a brush caress on the snare drum: it is this whole human process of music in the making that this record manages to capture!" - - Deep and light, conveying at once the dark and unsettling tone of the era and the extraordinary power of transfiguration and sublimation of art, the music on this record found its title in a brilliant phrase by Nietzsche taken from "Thus Spoke Zarathustra": "One must have chaos inside to give birth to a dancing star!" It could not be better said...--- Stéphane Ollivier ---.