ELODIE

Clarté Déserte

Genre: MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT

LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk aka Elodie reach their most captivating moment of quietude on a heart-stopping new album of muted piano, tape loops and delicately plucked strings, elevated into a heavenly sphere. Perhaps the most gentle and pure evocation of Quiet music we’ve heard since Dominique Lawalrée’s ‘First Meeting’ collection, it comes with our highest possible recommendation, especially if you’re into the waking-dream fantasies of Brian Eno’s Obscure label, Erik Satie or Virginia Astley.

‘Clarté Déserte’ ushers Elodie into its second decade of delicacies with a suite of beautifully elusive, poignant chamber works that typically benefit from the duo’s tongue-tip, pinch-yourself feel for atmosphere. We only cottoned onto their sound around half way thru the last decade, and they quickly became one of the go-to groups for music to colour our dreams. This new album - perhaps their most effortless and remarkable - sees them return to imaginary water-colour scapes, sketched to tape in 2020-21 with an ineffably subtle sort of psychedelia active in the music’s lysergic patina and melting melodies.

While the notion of ambient music in the modern era has too often become shorthand for mimetic milquetoast whimsy and a lack of imagination, Chalk & Van Luijk’s recordings still hold to original principles of modal minimalism and spirited spectral detail that made the original stuff - from Satie to Eno, to new age and soundtrack forms - so entrancing. On ‘Clarté Déserte’ Elodie summon these notions with patience and pacing, wreathing slivers of field recordings with the subtlest nods to country folk, Arabic and Indian musics, and the stately drift of European chamber classicism in a narrative arc that quite honestly left us sobbing.

From the daydream opening scenes of ‘Aumone’ to the drizzly nightfall of ‘Cantique’, ‘Clarté Déserte’ feels like nothing less than a spiritual cleanse, possessing a sort of poetic command of sandman magick that transcends overwrought conceptualism and is perhaps best compared to the feeling of involuntary goosebumps in moonlight.

LP (Black Vinyl) (10)