Mezzanine

Words by Keru Not Ever.

Mezzanine is an album of post-classical music. The twelve pieces that make it up are attempts to take the raw materials of instrumental music, dip them in mud, and turn them into shimmering confetti. Flutes, violins, clarinets, voices, cellos, piano, bass—these elements are all there, woven together through a mixture of hyper-sampling and recording, creating a chamber music without walls, without windows, suspended in stagnant air and multicolored dust. The conductor lies in bed, sheets pulled up to his shoulders.

Modeled on human breath, the pieces highlight the phenomena of loops and feedback, as though each time a theme is voiced, it must be repeated, insisted upon, until something else — a counter-melody — emerges to disrupt it. This is clear from the very first piece, Requiem Caesura, which functions like the tuning of a small orchestra, seemingly deaf to itself. Then come, to name just a few, the shimmering wind arrangements of Ghisolabella, the pulsing glissandi of the solo bass in Mezzanine, and, finally, the epilogue, Harmonies de la brûlure, a tableau of slow-moving harmonic ashes.

This album took a long time to create, the time it took to free myself from Tereza and The Wind Of? — old, forgotten music. Whether that time was worth it, that is, the doubt in which every melody is born, I can't say. What composes is always next to myself, an extimacy. But it's a leap in time, an interval of a few years, a leap based on certain musical ruins, anonymous shreds twisted in the throes of a pandemic, in the love and joys, the sudden lights striking the blind spots of a body. These are companion pieces produced from the detritus of history. They hold out a cold hand to those who lend an ear.