A new album by Philippe Petit, and they come by quite often these days. “Closing Our Eyes” is a 45-minute exploration of the boundaries between acoustic and electronic music, one of Philippe’s recurrent exercises. The promo sheet we always get with Crónica releases gives a little overview. He started with recontextualising Mahler’s first symphony, ‘Cordophony’, after which he kept the connection with acoustic instruments in his sound pallet. And admitted, this is well executed and produced, but there is a ‘but’ for me. The big but for me is experimentalism to ‘just’ experiment. Don’t get me wrong, not a bad word about the separate tracks, but I miss the coherency between the tracks. There is no general modus, no story being told … The concept is the symbiosis between acoustic instrumentation, electronic sound and the manipulation of acoustics in the electronic domain. The separate tracks are exceptionally well executed, for example, in “Part 2”, where the marimba seems to have a lead role as well as cymbals, and a lot is being done with resonant frequencies creating an ever so lovely soundscape.
‘Part 4’ has a central role for a prepared piano, but having heard “A Reassuring Elsewhere” and “Passing Thru” not too long ago, I am left with a weird feeling here. If you’ve just released albums with all piano sounds, why wasn’t this on one of those albums? Because it’s a beautiful track! Here, the beauty of it is lost between all the experiments. Maybe it’s also because a lot of the experiments are shorter tracks. The two tracks I mentioned are 10-minute, so Parts 2+4 are almost half of the album. That’s what I meant with coherency earlier. The drone layer in the 2nd part of “Part 5”: beautiful! The closing “Part 11” opens incoherent but becomes very lovely too with again a lead role for the piano.
“Closing Our Eyes” will not become my favourite Petit album, but it might carry my favorite Petit moments. (BW)