Chapelier Fou

Chapelier Fou left us in 2020 with his diptych Méridiens et Parallèles, which explored real and imagined places. With Quartz, his new opus, he tackles the question of time, its origins and its measurement. Just like the benchmark for time measurement, which over the centuries has moved 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, seeks to illuminate our relationship with time through the prisms of the infinitely large as well as the infinitely small.

Even though it is not strictly the material of music, time 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 origin, there is vibration, oscillation, present in everything, from monumental celestial bodies to the elementary photon. How, then, can we not see a kinship between the wave nature of sound and that of light? This is why light and color are so present in these compositions, down to the track titles: after Ex Nihilo which, starting from nothing, builds little by little a machine that swells until it derails, Gasoline Rainbow tries to ignite a rainbow, Pink Noise offers a journey into the physics of sound, Iris shifts from one tint to another without warning, 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 epic of nearly eight minutes.

In Memoriam, a short piece of deceptively simple beauty, unfolds a melody balancing 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 run into itself and become a wave in turn), Time Paradox asserts itself as a manifesto for the union of sound and light, of music and color. Quartz is a rich and intricate work, full of nods and self-citations, of spectres of all kinds and hidden messages. If it is impossible to traverse time in 43 minutes, Quartz strives, through its coherence and immersive aspect, to contain within itself more than the sum of its parts.