KINO MUSIC

Following his three reactions – Reaction A, Reaction B, Reaction C -, three albums in which Pierre Daven-Keller explored the trails of a certain pop scene or the mysteries of a string quartet on the model of what has been called New Music, here comes Kino Music, a new instrumental project which, as its title indicates, deliberately embraces the colors of cinema and more specifically its Italian skies. Pierre Daven-Keller makes no mystery of it: the model or more precisely the horizon of this album is Ennio Morricone in its pop and hedonistic inclinations, with a touch of Bossa Nova and, by extension, a certain variety of studio sound to which another great composer of that period could be related, Burt Bacharach.

However, this album is not about copying Morricone’s music is but giving it extensions or recomposing a state of mind which merges a certain idea of lightness with a touch of melancholy.

Specify one must that much as the Air duet or the solitary Forever Pavot, it is through the cinema of the 1960s and 70s that Pierre Daven-Keller was initiated to music, as if Morricone along with the original soundtracks of François de Roubaix, Michel Magne, or Eric Damarsan had flown through his veins. Besides Pierre Daven-Keller has displayed many times his attraction to cinema music by practicing it very directly here or there (La Répétition by Catherine Corsini, Le Voyage aux Pyrénées by the Larrieu Brothers, I am a No Man’s Land…).

However, Kino Music can by no means be reduced to a sort of imaginary movie soundtrack, or to some inspiration propeller or primary color.

The music it plays is absolutely autonomous, designed to accompany preexisting images as well as create new ones.

It embodies freedom in expression but also scientific mastery in instrumental mixes conceived as precision mechanics which would mutate into a ludic fabric to dress up the days of our lives and wander in the midst of our dreams. Dreaming could as well be the keyword of this concept album. Solar dreaming inspired by the sunlight of Marseille, the city where Pierre Daven-Keller created most of the record. Sensual dreaming that women’s voices incarnate intensely as they resound throughout the album. Helena Noguerra’s voice expands to the limits of torrid eroticism in The Atom’s Fiancé, one the of the summits of the album, as well in the very pleasant Tattoo Totem. And Arielle Dombasle’s voice too as she, for a track, Salvaje Corazon, comes to latinize the pop atmosphere which reigns over this record of pure pleasure. Precisely, the intense pleasure one feels listening to this Kino Music also lies in the science of the sound, the orchestration, the mixing skills typical of Pierre Daven- Keller. The sound texture, traversed here by a harpsichord, there by a Farfisa organ (as the title Farfisa properly indicates), elsewhere a vibraphone or a harpsichord (as in the very efficacious Corniche Kennedy, Sirrocco, or Easy Tempo) are mapping the beauty of this album inhabited by spirits of childhood, of a paradise lost and suddenly found. The arrangements make the most of the few that is to say evade overloads and allow Pierre Daven-Keller to recapture the imaginary world of his childhood and embark us with him. This produces a form of poetry which instantly makes one want to take one’s car and drive without purpose in the setting sun of a never-ending summer day. To enjoy this album one has to let go but not in the sense of a categorical imperative, rather as a slope one would slide on with a delectation that the contemporary musical landscape seldom consents to.

As he comes back to his own sources, real or imaginary, which are ours too, Pierre Daven-Keller has succeeded, with Kino Music, in giving shape to a fantasy or a fancy, like an extraordinary garden, luxurious, pop and wooded, like a magnetic field (to cite the programmatic title of the song that opens the album) as a promise of infinite happiness.