Chapelier Fou

Chapelier Fou left us in 2020 with his diptych Méridiens et Parallèles, which explored real and imaginary places. Seven years later, with Quartz, his new opus, he tackles the question of Time, its origins and its measurement.

Just as the standard of time measurement has, over the centuries, moved from the rotation of the Earth to its revolution around the Sun, then to the oscillation of the quartz crystal or the caesium atom, this album, in nine tracks that unfold as a continuum, sets out to shed light on our relationship with time through the prisms of the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

For time, even if it is not strictly speaking the material of music, is like the space that allows it to exist. From timbre to rhythm, from rhythm to form, and from form to album, it is the craftsman of musical construction.

At the outset there is vibration, oscillation, present in everything, from monumental celestial bodies down to the elementary photon. How, then, can one fail to see a kinship between the wave-like nature of sound and that of light?

That is why Light and Colour are so present in these compositions, right down to the titles of the tracks: after Ex Nihilo, which, starting from nothing, gradually builds a machine that swells until it breaks down, Gasoline Rainbow attempts to set a rainbow alight, Pink Noise offers a joyful journey through the physics of sound, Iris shifts from one hue to another without warning, while Eigengrau (the name given to the colour seen when we close our eyes) invites us to contemplate our own inner self in a long epic of nearly eight minutes.

In Memoriam, a short track of deceptive simplicity, unfolds a melody poised between optimism and nostalgia, before plunging into the infinitely vast space of Sinus Orbis.