Serge Houppin & Henry Torgue - Vertiges - 2001

01. Ad lib
02. Le Concile des Zoogs
03. Le Train Nu
04. Le Serment d'Alice
05. Oú va le monde
06. Malacca Bay
07. Aruana Song
08. Plume
09. Asraï
10. Salle d'Ecpéranca
11. L'Angelie
12. Soap
13. Belvédère du doute
14. Paupières de Sable

46:36 min

Played by Serge Houppin (guitar) & Henry Torgue (keyboards)
with
Vincent Courtois - cello
Anne-Flore Houppin - voice
Alain Lafuente - percussion
Nicolas Mizrachi - cello
Patrick Reboud - accordion

Produced by Serge Houppin & Henry Torgue

* * * * *

VERTIGES
by Robert Briatte

In the kingdom of everyday fantasy, the headless queen sets our heart in a whirl. This is what Vertiges, the new album by Henry Torgue and Serge Houppin, with its attractive and mysterious sleeve, shows us from the very outset.

A red flower blooming in an urban greyness, a modern lady-in-waiting trapped in concrete, or a puppet, seduced and abandoned there by some vague worshipper?
The reply to the torments of this dervish in a scarlet dress, with enticing legs calling out to those wonderful clouds for help, can be heard in these pieces of music.

It is a music that is full of many other images, pushing its inclination for dizzying heights to the upper reaches of the sky. Dance, or rather a series of dances, the fourteen pieces in this collection pays tribute to the ballet or the staging that inspired them.
Hovering between emotion and lucidity, between feeling and irony, between evidence and mystery, most of these fourteen pieces do not last more than three minutes because of a deliberate choice to be brief.
They are like fourteen mini-climates developed in a spiral, bouncing from one to the other in such a way that one has the impression of hearing them spinning around endlessly.

These fourteen phases of life ward off emptiness, they are populated with characters, vivacious or limp, supple or clumsy, inviting us to listen to their familiar and eternal stories without words.
Was the word "evidence" mentioned?
Cultivating the obvious is one of the main characteristics of the Hopi Mesa productions. Henry Torgue has an excellent way of expressing it. "Our melodies are already in the heads of our listeners; all we have to do is to make them really hear the music. We work on familiar ground, there are no intellectual extravagances in our compositions. Our main search is for simplicity. We reveal what is there already, and every member of the audience can claim 'I could have found that melody myself'. So whether it is in a minor or cheerier mode, we are close to the hearts of those who want to hear us."

It should not be imagined, however, that the tracks of Vertiges will lead us along the beaten path. Quite the contrary, the mystery is renewed with every piece, and one of the paradoxes of this album is that it makes us start from the end. Ad Lib is a very strange title for an introduction: murmurs of the crowd, indistinct words, distant echoes from the Djemaa el Fna square or from any other dreamlike landscape you may happen to cross during the darkest hours of your nights.
The slow, scarlet, Iberian, Andalusian procession, a nostalgic accordion slung over the shoulder ("Mr. Loyal, we are still waiting for you, what are you doing?"), begins to take shape. Ad Lib, with its touch of terror, is a brilliant way to introduce such a disturbing initiation into dreams.
And now our lady-in-waiting with the false air of a doll, starts to dance in the middle of the Djemaa el Fna, revisited by a Giorgio de Chirico. Vermilion queen of hearts, if I tried to embrace you, I am sure you would take to your heels.

Can music be described as threatening? Muted, insidious, a threat does in fact emanate from this introduction.
It is not The Council of the Zoogs, extricated from the sheets and thoughts of the sombre Lovecraft of Demons and Marvels that will make us change our minds.
The Zoogs are among us. Their hopping band does not mar the procession, but a loved one, more beautiful than the Orient – the Orient Express obviously – starts to trouble it with the limpid movements of an airy dance: The Naked Train like the Alice's Oath, is a bewitching tribute to fluid mechanics. The procession gets under way, its sails lifting in the light breeze of this inspired music. The tension is appeased by the elegy of the fugue. At this particular moment, no one would like to hear the queen of hearts shouting in the distance, "Cut her head off!" "Where is the world going?", with the misleading affability of a fanfare, played in a post-nuclear dance hall, is also mechanical.
The chief of the troupe has a disquieting smile, the celebration will not be complete, it is evident, until you have been killed. It is clear that all is not well with the world, Mister, but it has to go. Where, then?
To get lost, Mister, in the humidity of Malacca Bay, in the heady percussion of Aruana Song, in the coaxing lines of the accordion and the light music of Feather.
At this point, the first notes of the melodious summit of this record seep in with the splendid Asraï, a desperate gymnopaedia, swinging subtly between derision and forcefulness.
It is played to a fairly classical accompaniment, until it loses its equilibrium in a slow descent to hell, down the abyss of the right side of the keyboard. A return to the Orient with The Room of Hope, which starts with an ambulance siren, that reviled and badly loved yet adored Orient, that necessary and complicated Orient where everything leads us to the sources of ourselves.
The tribute is clear and impeccable, without the exoticism of a bazaar; it is a voyage free of illusions, despite the misleading title.
During a pause in a waiting room, in the anti-chamber of ourselves, we sway between amnesia and anaesthesia. A fascinating rhythm becomes insistent.
In total contrast to the majesty of Angélie, here is a kingdom in which everything is music, with the discreet tension of Soap, a miniature operatic drama.
And there is more majesty in the bitter view of the rediscovered atmosphere of fairground and mechanical music, in Belvedere of Doubt.
A broken down merry-go-round turns, for the benefit perhaps of the ineffable Mister Kite, who used to perform many years ago in the circus where the Orchestra of Solitary Hearts played.
So many years ago Eyelids of Sand, a lullaby for a lost childhood, closes the album which had to come to an end anyway. The atmosphere is indecisive. One glance crosses another. The procession has barely formed, it seems to us.

However this impression only lasts for an instant, for time has in fact passed, just a little over forty-six minutes, which still seem to be flying by because when the music stops, it can still be heard. It is time to go. Our eyes are red from having stayed up to watch over the cradle of our childhood, in an interval of life in which music is rocked between joy and drama, between consciousness and abandon.

This music should be heard loud, very loud, to the point of feeling dizzy.

http://rapidshare.com/files/67...fe_Music_67864898THVertigo.rar