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 sealed their association twenty years ago, the three comrades of Das Kapital sign with "One Must Have Chaos Inside to Give Birth to a Dancing Star" an album-assessment in the form of a poetic manifesto of great lyrical intensity, transfiguring the latent tensions of the contemporary world through the prism of a miraculous instantaneous collective harmony of sensibility. We may have forgotten it a little, as over the years the group Das Kapital has found its voice and cultivated its difference by most often developing its libertarian poetics embracing the entire spectrum of modern jazz and contemporary experimental music, based on pre-existing thematic material (whether drawn from the fundamentally "impure" art of the German composer Hanns Eisler blurring the boundaries between popular tradition and avant-garde, from the vast repertoire of melodies participating in the French tradition in all its forms or original compositions) - but the trio formed and asserted itself at the turn of the 2000s in a register unambiguously related to improvised music, in the broadest and freest sense of the term. All three came from very diverse aesthetic backgrounds, and already rich in personal journeys singularly crossing a European music scene then in full creative effervescence in its desire for generalized hybridization, the Dane Hasse Poulsen, the German Daniel Erdmann and the Frenchman Edward Perraud invented together from their first concerts a highly spontaneous and totally open music, both in its influences and in its formal options. "It was immediately magnetic between us," recalls Hasse Poulsen. "We started playing without a preconceived concept, without the project of belonging to a particular style - with only the desire to cross our experiences and see what would come out!" "If something singular and personal immediately emerged," adds Daniel Erdmann, "it was not thought out. It was only in and through playing that it happened." Breaking with a certain dogmatism of generative improvised music, ideologically distrustful of pulsation, melody and more generally any element of language referring directly or indirectly to tradition, the young internationalist brigade, far from making a clean sweep of the past, immediately distinguished itself by embracing and cheerfully mixing in its iconoclastic music all the more or less subliminal references passing through the crucible of its authentically collective discourse. "We didn't forbid ourselves anything," summarizes Edward Perraud. "If during the improvisation a melody, a rhythm or an allusion to a particular style appeared, 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 phase with the times, conscientiously applying itself to abolish all forms of boundaries between learned and popular music by fully taking advantage of the originality of a tightrope walker's 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 at the heart of its project through a handful of inspired albums, imposed on the European scene of improvised music the profound originality of a falsely simple and authentically free universe, combining uninhibited formal inventiveness with a constant lyrical power. - - Twenty years have passed since this advent and, after not only having accumulated common records but each on their own having engaged in the most varied and ambitious projects, the three "masterminds" of Das Kapital felt the need for a kind of "return to basics" in the form of an update and a great regenerating gesture. "We offered Label Bleu to lock ourselves in the studio for five days, without thematic material or any preparation," explains Edward Perraud, "the goal being to improvise in a form of total freedom, in order to capture in real time the energies that today animate us both individually and collectively!" 41 improvisations were thus created in three intense days of recording - of which 7, after a long process of listening, sifting and decanting, were finally selected to give form to this new album of extraordinary freshness and maturity combined! "The idea was precisely to find this freshness in the sound, which we realize the more we advance in music, that it constitutes the most mysterious and probably the most quintessential aspect of creation," specifies Perraud - "I find that from this point of view, our objective has been achieved: this album, by reconnecting with the completely improvised spirit of our beginnings, manages to capture without the slightest filter the music that we make together today!" "That's exactly it," 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 times changed but so have we. We have a real-time analysis level of our music being created which has considerably developed both individually and collectively. It's a bit like we are the first witnesses of the music we make and that inevitably generates new forms and new types of energy. We are less in the éclat, ironic distanciation, iconoclastic violence - much more in logics of alloy, weaving, as if it were a matter of gathering in the same shared discourse, all that we have accumulated over time of knowledge and experience." Recorded live, in a form of intimacy inducing very subtle collective dynamics in a dreamlike register while awakening the senses, this vibrant music, under tension, profound, complex, powerfully introspective, appears to be traversed throughout by a paradoxical form of serenity even sweetness, based on an understanding and complicity between the three musicians, truly miraculous! Always very free in its shared gesture, resolutely open to the unexpected, and at the same time extraordinarily formally held to the point of often giving the impression of being composed, this long suite benefited from a real sound scenographer's work from the sound engineer Maïkôl Seminatore, faithful partner of the trio since its beginnings... "These are the most natural takes that we kept in the end, those that best reflected the general tone of the session," confides Daniel Erdmann. "There were no cuts, the temporalities were scrupulously respected to reflect the drama specific to each improvisation, but Maïkôl spent hours in post-production working on reframing and magnifying effects on certain details which ultimately contributes decisively to the very particular atmosphere of the session and to the definitive form taken by the music." "We may never have heard the alchemy between us so well," summarizes Edward Perraud, "the way we pass the ball 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 then be prolonged by a caress of the brushes on the snare drum: it is this whole human process of music being created that this album manages to capture!" - - Deep and light, reflecting both the dark and disturbing tone of the era and the extraordinary power of transfiguration and sublimation of art, the music of this album 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!" One could not say it better... --- Stéphane Ollivier ---.