Le Lai de l´Eau

a musical alchemy

Compilation - Playlist You Tube

Music for two documentaries for Vietnam TV  :

Vietnam My Heart (Vietnam Tin Toi) with English subtitles

 

Souls of Hanoi

4 parts documentary on 50 years Hanoi - no subtitles, VTV didn´t bother to delete the time code, so we have to live with it...

The whole thing was done in 5 days over Skype, between the first call from with Manouchehr Abrontan in Vietnam who desperately needed better music than what the production was proposing, and the last bit which he needed on the Saturday because of his flight back the next day.

Manouchehr´s idea was to illustrate traditional Vietnam – why I used the monochord, pretending it to be a sort of Vietnamese Koto - and determination, will, dark past memories, growing into the design of their future as a nation.

 

The third part is cut around a composition starting with a 4/4 and evolving into a 7/4 rhythm. Because of some technical defect, I used the original track I had sent, which also provides the proper coda with rallentando. Fortunately, the tempo is almost the same throughout the different parts, except for a bit of the original song Africain which Manou had already with him, because he is a fan.

I thought of the 7/4 piece because of the layering of complementary melodies. I had had the idea for this song during a cycle ride long ago where I heard the wind doing the triplet melody and my weighing on the pedals on a 7/4 rhythm. Somehow it reminds me of Mike Oldfield, but he certainly didn´t play a 7/4 on a D minor ostinato tuned on 144 Hz, the frequency of the planet Mars, which is said to produce strong will power…

Vietnam is not a member of International Copyright treaties, so that´s me sitting on Sacem royalties...

What about the 4th part? I don´t have it.

Viole à Voile

a song on my CD The Missing Link

I did this video with some excerpts from Vietnam Tin Toi

The Wind Cries Satie

Four videos made with the technical help (colour grading) of Gerhard Ehrmann, using extracts from two public domain films

  • Gnossienne 1 -> A Propos De Nice -Jean Vigo -1930
  • Travioles - Danses de Travers -> René Clair, "Paris qui dort / The Crazy Ray" 1927. In contrast to film music which has to support the content of the images, here the images are used to support the music. The theme of the film seems quite appropriate, a man very high up in Paris wakes up one day in a sleeping city...

 

et cetera

Duet with Hartmut Schmid - texts and voice where I played all the instruments

Seven videos made with public domain films

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