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Multi-instrumentalist Christine Ott is one of those artists who is helping to bridge the gap between the worlds of pop and art music, breaking down walls through her various collaborations and the aesthetics she develops in her work.
This permeability passes through the filter of minimalism and the sound effects made possible by electronics, of which she makes abundant use, common bases that facilitate this rapprochement. After two highly successful albums in 2020, Chimère(solo on ondes Martenot) and Snowdrops (chamber music duo with Mathieu Gabry, joined by violist Anne-Irène Kempf), Christine Ott 's Time to Die is a "sensory voyage between the world of the living and the dead".
For the eponymous first track, Christine Ott becomes a one-woman orchestra (Roland Jupiter-8, Korg Monotron, percussion), assisted by Mathieu Gabry, to open a ritual with oriental consonances, evoking the hieratic frescoes of acid rock from the great psychedelic period. The arrival of a ceremonial, martial timpani beat sets the pace and carries the ceremony through to the final rainfall. This charged sonic ambience (the lapping sound of rain inevitably evokes at least one memory in each of us) provides a bridge to the pianistic intimacy of "Brumes". All repeated notes, heady magical formulas that wrap around themselves, swirling in an ever-widening reverberation, the piece is carried away in a growing ardor. Landscape" begins again in stark contrast, with Christine Ott's ethereal vocals, multiplied by the recording, over a stripped-down, almost mechanical arpeggiated piano, set against the melodic flow of the vocals. Here, the musician's glittering "Chasing Harp", haloed by subtle shimmering, reverberating, undulating and aquatic sound effects, seems to resurface like a song from a distant, forgotten past.
Melancholy disappears in the dark, disquieting climate of the noisy introduction to "Horizons fauves", whose textures support a few rare, hesitant piano tremolos, which eventually develop into arpeggios, whose fragrances evoke a repetitive minimalism close to Philip Glass. "Comma Opening" is a delicate, uncluttered ondes Martenot solo in which the same melody is repeated ad infinitum, with multiple variations in register and timbre. "Miroirs" begins with the piano's simple, repetitive arpeggios, while an increasingly spatial resonance delicately insinuates itself, followed by a slight echo, transforming the piano's simple enunciation into a shimmering curtain of pearls crossed by the sun's rays. Rain" returns, and the disc concludes with a floating, deeply nostalgic mood, in which the piano is enriched by the counterpoint of ondes Martenot. Is this the end of the journey, and the final departure of the departed soul to a new haven?
Guillaume Kosmicki