SEVEN POEMS ON WATER

Description

Originally, Abhra - which, in Sanskrit, means both atmosphere and emptiness - was commissioned by the Centre International des Musiques Nomades and the Grenoble Détours de Babel Festival (as part of the Les Chantiers 2014 call for projects). Abhra then explored the Journal of Henry David Thoreau, an American philosopher, poet, and scholar born in 1817. Thoreau placed nature at the center of his thought and extracted a morality from it - praising independence, simplicity, and hedonistic asceticism... To be and to be rooted in the world, one simply needs to breathe, taste, touch, look, listen to silence, feel, contemplate, observe... An album was released in 2016, marking a collaboration between the labels Onze Heures Onze and Auand. As a continuation of this work, Abhra's new repertoire is written on poems that all have water in common. Water explored in seven texts by poets from seven different countries, from Guinean Raquel Illonde to American Emily Dickinson, via Turkish Nazim Hikmet and Indian Pryal Gagan... Julien Pontvianne and Abhra immerse us in a delicate, intimate universe, and stubbornly continue to question the role of the voice, timbre, resonance, melody, and forms of song...