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Joce Mienniel takes us on an inner journey to the land of dreams in this very beautiful record. And not just any dream: it is his own dreams, patiently collected and recorded over the course of the night, that the flutist proposes to explore within a very electric quartet, with strong pop accents.
From the beginning, through the two parts of "Hopeless", the tone is set: the album oscillates between dreamy and soaring tracks, shrouded by an ecstatic and reverberated piano, as one has the right to expect with such a title; and other stages in which the tone hardens, to propel the sleeper into the wild rhythmic gears of an implacable mechanism. As we know only too well, the sleep of a dreamer is not a restful one!
On "Two Tiny Black Eyes ", which is based on the same change of atmosphere, the flutist Joce Mienniel is also a singer and a Korg MS20 player, this mythical synthesizer with its warm and powerful bass sounds that made the beautiful hours of many aesthetics, from progressive rock to techno music, for a track with eighties synth pop colours. For the musician, who also sings on several other tracks, does not refuse any influence and delivers without complex, with this album, his affective musical background like a sound CV. To do so, he joins forces with pianist and keyboardist Vincent Lafont, guitarist Maxime Delpierre and drummer Sébastien Brun, who often ignite the compositions with a rock energy. Listening to such an album, one can legitimately ask oneself why one should sometimes still try to classify music.
Joce MIENNIEL - THE DREAMER from Romain AL. on Vimeo.
Another example? In one three-part track, 'Apartment 643', the initial airy flute and piano wisps disappear completely into a saturated, industrial rhythm loop, before, over a theatrical harmonic sequence and saturated guitar worthy of Ennio Morricone, a passionate flute solo begins, in the manner of a guitar hero's romantic flight, ending with a powerful, pathetic piano chord reminiscent of the end of the Beatles' 'A Day in the Life'.
Mienniel also plays the harmonica on " Nude Was the Color of My Innocence ", and even the kalimba on a gentle cover of "Money" from Roger Waters' Dark Side of the Moon . After 'Rare Thing', a four-part epic whose finale soars on an almost electro kick drum , another haunting theme is taken up at the end of the album: Michael Nyman's 'The Garden Becoming a Robe Room', written in 1982 for Peter Greenaway's film Murder in an English Garden.
Just like those nights when the brain offers us a grandiose Cinemascope show, Joce Mienniel's pieces come in the varied colours of frescoes with great effects, where the self, the superego and the unconscious converse musically with an open heart.
Guillaume Kosmicki
A nice interview with Joce Miennel on citizenjazz, to read here.
