Serene Apocalypse

Description

Apocalypse means revelation.

What could be more conducive to serenity than to learn that stupidity is doomed to disappear?

Admittedly, it stings a little, but it gives you a sense of direction. And one understands in passing why today’s crowds are so easily subjugated (“…the nations were deceived by your enchantments” from pharmakeia = magic – Rev 18,23).

Xavier Mignon is a poet, photographer and writer. He has produced a DVD slide show with excerpts from the Apocalypse of St. John, completed with his poems and illustrated with his own photographs. On the DVD, the texts are read by actors and accompanied by my music.

As the music is not included in its entirety, I decided to make this CD separately.

It is the result of a 3 years work, between the idea and its realization. Even though I already knew the text, the addition of the poems and the vision of the photographs led me to immerse myself deeply into the theme of the Apocalypse text, to draw the “substantial marrow” from it and make it a work of art. It is also an important step in the evolution of my compositional style.

In music, I’ve always been an improviser, from year to year I’ve always worked with the aim of keeping as much spontaneity as possible in my improvisations, and avoiding any mannerism, whether it be baroque or jazz (current music which still envisages improvisation). I try to develop a different and more traditional improvisation practice, therefore modal, but current.

Modal means playing only the notes of a particular mode. Gregorian is the theoretical basis of Western music. Each mode today known as “church” produces a particular state of mind and an effect on the listener – a particular “colour” of emotion.

Each note of the mode will nuance this effect. The musician must respect the mode. Indian music has kept these definitions (ragas) and continued a practice of modal improvisation, which is why a musician has a great interest in studying it (studying does not mean imitating). Mixing modes in an improvisation destroys their effect by reducing them to a grey mixture of emotions from which only the lowest on the human psychological scale will emerge (as in a crowd).

As in my previous productions, each piece has its own life and develops to the end, without being subject to a 3-minute advertising imperative, the attention span generally accepted for the “control” of populations.