Chapelier Fou

Chapelier Fou left us in 2020 with his diptych Méridiens et Parallèles, which explored real and imaginary places. Seven years later, with Quartz, his new opus, he tackles the question of time, its origins and its measurement.

Just as the time standard, through the centuries, has evolved from the rotation of the Earth to the revolution around the Sun, and then to the oscillation of quartz crystal or the cesium atom, this album, in nine tracks that unfold like a continuum, aims to illuminate our relationship with time through the prisms of the infinitely large as well as the infinitely small. For time, even if it is not strictly the material of music, is like the space that allows it to exist. From timbre to rhythm, from rhythm to form, from form to disc, it is the craftsman of musical construction.

From the outset, there is vibration, oscillation, present in everything, from monumental celestial bodies to the elementary photon. How, then, can one not see a kinship between the wave-like nature of sound and that of light? That is why light and color are present in these compositions, even in the track titles: after an Ex Nihilo that, starting from nothing, gradually builds a machine that swells until it goes awry, Gasoline Rainbow tries to ignite a rainbow, Pink Noise offers a journey into the physics of sound, Iris shifts from one hue to another without notice, while Eigengrau, the name given to the color seen when we close our eyes, invites us to contemplate the interior of ourselves in a long odyssey of nearly eight minutes.

In Memoriam, a short piece of apparent simplicity, unfolds a melody between optimism and nostalgia, then plunges into the infinitely large space of Sinus Orbis. Before concluding the cycle of this record with the starry night of Nox, a cycle that can follow itself and become a wave in turn, the psychedelic Time Paradox asserts itself as a manifesto of the union of sound and light, of music and color. Quartz is a complex work, full of nods and self-citations, of specters of all kinds and hidden messages. If it is impossible to traverse time in 43 minutes, Quartz strives, through its cohesion and immersive quality, to contain in itself more than the sum of its parts.