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 addresses the question of time, its origins and its measurement.

Just like the standard of temporal measurement, which over the centuries has passed from the rotation of the Earth to the revolution around the Sun, and then to the oscillation of the quartz crystal or the cesium atom, this album, in nine tracks that unfold like a continuum, aims to illuminate our relation to time through the prisms of the infinitely large as well as the infinitely small. For time, even though 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. At the outset, there is vibration, oscillation, present in all things, from monumental celestial bodies to the elementary photon. How, then, can one not see a kinship between the wave nature of sound and that of light?

That is why light and color are very present in these compositions, right down to the track titles: after an Ex Nihilo which, starting from nothing, builds little by little 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 warning, while Eigengrau (the name given to the color we see when we close our eyes) invites us to contemplate the inside of ourselves in a long epic of almost eight minutes. In Memoriam, a short piece of apparent simplicity, deploys 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 because it can follow on with 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 lush and complex work, full of nods and self-citations, of specters of all kinds and hidden messages. If it is impossible to circle time in 43 minutes, Quartz strives, through its cohesion and immersive aspect, to contain within it more than the sum of its elements. Chapelier Fou will present Quartz in concert at La Rayonne in Villeurbanne on April 1, 2027 at 6:00 PM.