Скачать или смотреть "Il Viaggio" by Melanie De Biasio

Hi. This is Vince Reilly. The internet’s non-genre music music nerd.

Some time ago a neighbour lent me the CD ‘No Deal’ by the Belgian singer Melanie De Biasio, and I’ve taken great interest in her ever since. The problem I have with Jazz is when it sounds like Jazz, and one could label ‘No Deal’ as Jazz, but for me there are too many influences from Indie Rock and contemporary Classical to pigeon hole it so easily.

Her next album ‘Lilies’ was even more fused and far more experimental, and her latest release ‘Il Viaggio’ has really pushed the boat out. It is actually a double CD. The first ’Lay Your Ear to the Rail’ is an idea I have currently been working on myself, a collection of ambient songs. They are invariably slow and the attention is less on melody than textures produced by a great variety of sound sources including guitars, synths and samples.

The second CD, ‘The Chaos Azure,’ is mostly instrumental and even more decisively
ambient, is again about 40 minutes long but consists of only 2 piecest. The title track is a slow rather eerie mixture of, among other sounds, humming, cello, acoustic guitar, piano and birdsong, and lyrical singing only comes about 10 minutes into the track. For me though, the other piece ’Alba’ is a more substantial work of art. Again there are birdsong and humming, but what dominates the piece is a treated flute playing only two notes. Paul Gauguin once said of Claude Monet, ‘Monet is just an eye … but what an eye!’ The same could be said of these two notes…but what two notes! As a musician and music recorder I have almost no interest in virtuosity but in placing the right note in the right place at the right time. What I find most impressive here is that de Baisio physically plays these notes repeatedly, so each phrase is slightly different, making the work wonderfully rich and organic.

What is most impressive of ‘Il Viaggio’ as a whole is de Baisio’s enormous shift in direction and, let me be perfectly clear about this, she doesn’t give a flying fuck what people think. Wanting her to return to Jazz would be like Radiohead to go back to their Grunge Rock sound of their first three albums. ‘Il Viaggio’ is the greatest left field turn since ‘Kid A’ and I thank de Baisio and Radiohead for having the confidence and courage to make them.

I thank you for listening, welcome any comments and, Melanie de Biasio’s ‘Il Viaggio’? :

Lay your ear to the rail
The track ends without warning