TEMPUS by Laura Perrudin

CD : https://bmcrecords.hu/en/albums/laura-perrudin-tempus

"TEMPUS is a solo for strings. Strings in the form of vocal cords, plucked strings, hacked strings. It is an attempt to feel time differently, not to submit to its passage but to dance with it, to play with it, to make a friend of it.

This is a return to a more raw form of music, acoustic, and minimal. After years of experimenting with the nascent instrument that is the inline chromatic harp (which has become electric) and deploying luxuriant electronic orchestrations, I wanted to create a vacuum around my strings. To put them in the centre, naked, to better allow their spectrums to be heard.

In TEMPUS, I return to my first instrument, that of my childhood: The “Celtic harp” or “lever harp”. As well as the guitar, which until now I have played only in the privacy of my bedroom. Here, the customary functions of these two instruments are often given a twist: they are prepared, tinkered with, hacked.
The tuning of the lever harp explores the possible asymmetry of its different octaves to open up multi- modal harmonic horizons. The way it is played, often pseudo-percussive, is strongly inspired by the language of drumming. Each finger becomes a limb of the drummer’s body that I’ve always dreamed of being, playing the imaginary kick drum or snare of this little kit of prepared strings.
The guitar is often played like a harp: a modulating harp for the right hand, upside down.
Together, they form an instrumental chimera with two strung heads, to knit an imaginary and gnarled folk music, artisanal soul criss-crossed by trances of raw noise and impressionist colours.

Each song was woven slowly, spontaneously and intuitively. Without going through musical writing, without trying to understand, but just to feel. Taking advantage of the analytical blindness imposed by at times random open-tunings, it was a question of letting the gesture decide for itself, of letting the ear guide the voice, without the desire to contort the form to a preconceived idea or to customary concepts.

The lyrics oscillate between French and English. Each language is a different instrument-material: English-wood, with its knots, its tonic accent reliefs and its solid joints; French-textile, fluid, undulating. They each compose and sculpt music in their own way: deploying their own temporalities, colours, textures, resistances, lights, and ways of dealing with meaning.

In TEMPUS, time is the theme, the material, the territory, and the main character of the story. The texts explore the multiple faces and masks of this word that we use indiscriminately, without knowing whether it designates an actual entity, a social convention, a mental construction, or an intimate sensation (C’est vous qui passez).
It claims a right to time in a world that presses, compacts, standardizes and sells it. We listen to it breathe again (Rhinocéros), we twist it, we fold it like a fabric and we explore its tree-like structure populated
by ghosts (Time Creases, Reverse). Time heals blindness and closes wounds (Black Light). It reveals images by decanting troubled waters (See). We meet its thieves and exploiters (Time Thieves, Le Nerf de la Guerre), we seek to find the long time (despite urgency) without which no paradigm shift is possible.
It explores old and new ecologies of attention, restoring value to the slow, the non-spectacular, and the “useless”.

In the midst of a world that fetishizes fresh flesh, TEMPUS looks at age and the traces of time as treasures of experience. Death is a friend with whom to dialogue, sing and dance (Meaning) rather than a monster one should look away from (Le Point du Temps). TEMPUS is a musical vanitas, in the sense of the Baroque tradition: a picture-window onto our relationship with Death and our strategies for turning
our eyes away from it (Je n’oublie personne). A Memento mori that tries to contemplate the ephemeral without fear or nostalgia, with joy and playfulness.

In an attempt at temporal utopia (Utempia), – time asserts itself in a free, invented, flexible, and non- commercial territory. The linear and quantitative time of Chronos is deliberately neglected for that of Kaïros, opportune time, and Aïon, cyclical time. A temporal Libertalia is founded, where its own rhythmic and perceptual laws are rewritten.

I try here to inhabit the present as free, gentle, wild, tranquil, and radical water. And with these songs, I invite you in."

songs, beats, noises
harps, voice, knobs

lauraperrudin.com
bmcrecords.bfan.link
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