A pivotal figure in a certain French experimental scene that is fond of traditional music, percussionist Alexis Degrenier released his first solo album last fall. In six movements as delicately as they are powerfully poetic, La Mort aura tes yeux can be listened to as a thrilling and poignant, vibrant and very much alive experience of duration.

Written ? Unwritten? It's been a long time sinceAlexis Degrenier asked himself the question. More precisely, since he followed the advice of his teachers at the conservatory - where he studied percussion and composition - who urged him "with great benevolence" to go and see elsewhere (as he told in March 2022 to Liberation on the eve of his concerts at the Sonic Protest festival), to immerse himself in the world of drone music that has always fascinated him: the traditional music of the Middle East, of which he is a fervent follower, but also that of the Massif Central where he now lives.
Since then, he has played percussion and hurdy-gurdy in the Minisym ensemble, dedicated to the music of Moondog, and in the La Nòvia collective, which brings a breath of fresh air and experimentation to the folk music scene. With some of its members, he was able to initiate projects as exciting as La Tène or Tanz Mein Herz.

It was during a long three-year stay in hospital that kept him away from concert halls that Alexis Degrenier matured a solo project - Mouvement fantômes, membres miroirs - which was extended by this album published in November by Murailles Music and Standard In-fi: Death will have your eyes. An album composed, mixed and pre-mastered by him, which deploys an atypical instrumentarium at the service of a surprisingly rich minimalism.

The weather

Fatiguer, the opening track, sets the tone for this record, whose six infinitive tracks are haunted by the idea of exhaustion and disappearance: it intertwines the clattering of metronomes and other stopwatches with the tinkling of three bells, while in the background a drum beats out a pulse that resembles a heart beat. It's almost nothing (in the Ferrarese sense of the term), but the way it happens - the subtlety with which the different sound planes are composed and orchestrated, the play of panoramas, the refinement of textures and treatments, which in the last two minutes install a fascinating polyrhythm - all this creates a whole swarming, organic, literally thrilling world in our ears.

Alexis Degrenier is a musician of an insane erudition, but he is also in love with cinema - that of Jean-Luc Godard, whom he reveres (he is, moreover, one of the dedicatees of the record, like György Ligeti), or of the filmmaker Rose Lowder, with whom he regularly collaborates - and even more with poetry. This is particularly noticeable in Épuiser, the piece that closes side A: the circulation of the balls and the hum of the rubbed skins first evoke some distant storm swirling in stereo, before the "played stones" come to gin up what sounds like the first drops of a shower. A climatic content, properly elementary, which has the modesty and the plenitude of a haiku of Bashô:

"In the rainy season
Sounds that fall
I am all ears."

Unless these "falling noises", that this flow is that of time?

The time it takes

" I don't believe in the idea of 'personal voice', that would be rather pretentious. For me, there are moments, time, durations and moments. What attracts me is what lies within these points," the musician recently told the British webzine 15 Questions. Time seems to be the "subject", or rather the essential material of this rigorously architected record: two sides with three pieces each, of which the two middle pieces seem to answer each other, with their drone box. Of these six pieces, it is probably not a coincidence that two of them are spread out over an exact number of minutes, while the four others all stop at the last second - the 59th...
The perpetual (though irregular) beat that runs through it - a bit like the one that runs from one end to the other of An Hour For Piano by Tom Johnson, a 60-minute score in which the pianist counts down each second - makes the whole record sound like a countdown.

I am not unaware of how much Alexis - who still dedicates his record to " every moment, even the last ones / (...) / To oblivion, as long as it does not come / To my loss / To illness ..." - is wary of "storytelling"; and rightly so, if one considers the way in which it triumphs almost everywhere these days, taking precedence over analysis, to the point of becoming a "storytelling". - is wary of the "storytelling"; rightly if we think of the way in which this one triumphs a little everywhere nowadays, taking the place of the analysis, to the point of becoming very often the first of the selling points as regards cultural goods.
Nevertheless, I must admit that in many cases, the knowledge of the author's life, of the biographical context in which his work was born, gave an extra intensity to the aesthetic experience that it proposed to me. (Knowing, for example, that Lili Boulanger composed it on her deathbed, by dictating it to her sister Nadia, makes listening to her sublime Pie Jesu (1918); that David Sylvain recorded Dead Bees On A Cake (1999), the happiest of his records if not the best, shortly after meeting his future wife, gives a particular color to this one. Similarly, knowing Vladimir Nabokov's biography - to quote an author dear to Alexis Degrenier's heart, though particularly critical of such speculations - intensifies the emotion provided by the magnificent passages on mourning or on first love that punctuate The Gift, his ultimate Russian novel. Knowing that of Leos Carax gives a particularly touching relief to his appearance, alongside his daughter, in the last scene of his film Annette (2021). Etc. etc.)

Thus, if I link it to Alexis Degrenier's biography, to this life suspended by illness, La Mort aura tes yeux takes on an even more melancholic tone to my ears, vibrates with a more precious energy. Nommer, undoubtedly the darkest piece, with its deep gongs and the fascinating interlacing of parasitic textures created by various "vibrating objects", is chanted by a martial drumming that resounds like a march towards the scaffold (it made me think, who knows why, of Death Of A Man from Death In June (1986), a long instrumental setting the death of the writer Yukio Mishima to music.) A "mortal beat" which brings me back once again to poetry (that of Jean Tardieu).

Terminer, which closes the album at the end of the breath, ends, after the final resonance of a gong and a bowl, on a fade, like the sound of footsteps moving away... Thus, at the end of the listening of this great record, in the silence, it is the time that remains.

David Sanson