La foi gelée

Description

At the forefront of a music freed from the divide between instruments and machines and from stylistic camps, Monolithe Noir continues its creative quest with a fourth album, ideally positioned between melodic obsessions, liberated sonic experiments, and intimate narratives. In recent years, Antoine Messager Pasqualini has made a striking sound documentary, Rebecca, devoted to the free and marginal trajectory of a British woman found dead in a village in Brittany where she had rebuilt her life. The writing of this project deeply unsettled the musician and drew part of the composition process for this fourth album, begun in the summer of 2023. It is by leaving Brussels for Brest, near where he was born, and then becoming a father that Messager Pasqualini finds again the meaning and love needed to make a record. Having returned to a solo formula after Rin, the previous trio album, Monolithe Noir succeeds in drawing nourishment from his fieldwork on Rebecca, which resonates with his next album. Words and sound elements collide to generate two works that are nevertheless completely distinct in form. This fourth album by Monolithe Noir is the most sung, the most direct - and, while it repeatedly addresses mourning, it is also the brightest. From the frantic race through the city in search of a lost animal friend (Long bridge) to the slow nocturnal search through the alleyways of a steep neighborhood (Down in), and on to the mystical explosion (la foi gelée) that slowly settles in a murky bath, half-soothing, half-worrying; La foi gelée unfolds as a succession of emotional and physical mountains, marked by “doors” inviting one to another stage, without specifying whether it is the next or the previous one. Without abandoning synths, Monolithe Noir’s instrumentation subtly shifts toward saturated guitars and bowed strings, the bass asserts itself as the king instrument, and the voice slips in (Virgox) or asserts itself head-on (Seek you, la foi gelée). Flutter, the central piece of Monolithe Noir, condenses the themes addressed on the record, brings together a whole clique of musicians (Clara Levy, Raphaële Germser, Isabelle Sainte-Rose, Christophe Claeys, Billy Fuller, Aurélien Auchain, Yannick Dupont), and pays tribute to those who swim out toward the open sea without looking back and without worrying whether they still have their footing or not. If this fourth album was built this way, it is so that its maker could lose himself in it too.