Jean-Claude Eloy - Kâmakalâ / Etude III / Fluctuante-Immuable FLAC

The CD gather three very dissimilar pieces. This expansion demonstrates at least one thing, the fertility of Eloy's imagination and its ability to renew itself. These three pieces are dissimilar perhaps only in appearance, because there is a baroque character that is common, it is impossible to describe each in a unique and clear image for all three pieces as he handle complexity not only in the assembly of notes but in stylistic disasters. Eloy ignores categories and detonated them. It is far from flashbacks found in traditional forms. With Eloy, it starts from a point A to go on a point X or Y through a variety of epics.
In Etudes III, it took me a long time to achieve to understand it, because the evidence of serial in the beginning has hid me the rest. In fact I realized that that serialism was neither obscure nor demonstrative. It was a moving serialism or a failed one, that was devoured by spectral entities and by the ghost of Varese. The Third piece Fluctuante-Immuable keeps us lose surf in surf. So accents in Scelci style lead us to a kind of concerto for keyboard (electronic organ?) Shredded by shrapnel brass supernatant to a total dislocation in a storm of tonitruances and dissonances. Sometimes one has the impression that the order return back but again to be tossed by the waves and start to drift.
The main piece Kâmakalâ which opens the CD grows about thirty minutes.
To allow the measure before to listen, I can try to compare it with other pieces. But to do this, the comparison can't be done only with the greatest composers of the twentieth century, Ligeti, Xenakis and Scelsi. The importance of the voice can remind the Requiem, but with Eloy, we are in a barbarous incantations more than in the scriptures. Xenakis could be summoned by an analogy of excitement and movement of wind that affects rush in the piece call "Jonchaie" and at the same time, there is a reappropriation of the Indonesian Kechak / Kejak by Eloy similar to what do Xenakis with gamelan in the the same "Jonchaie" . Glissandi are even heard, but ultimately very rough and of a far more abrasive than Xenakis. Scelci is implicit in a kind of earthly gravity. And what is most surprising in this contemporary piece is repetition, not an American style but a repetitive haunting, slow and sickly addictive. Electroacoustic accents are even felt in panoramics of voices that slip from choirs to choirs, despite the stereo recording.
Kâmakalâ is like a river, it moves without anything to retain, it sinks and swells, enriched grows inexorably until the drums come shred, dislocate, the blow, and choirs (a huge workforce of five choirs) come themselves and get to implode by percussion. Opposite images are generated by this piece, we don't know if we are witnessing an original cataclysm, a chain explosion of supernovae, a gigantomachy, or simply if we are watching a countryside or restless forest animal minor activities. Perhaps it is that all together.
There is madness in all these parts, salvating madness.