Recently, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Eric Chenaux’s recordings. His countertenor voice (or light tenor at times) allows him to interpret soaring melodies, very close to pop, soul, or jazz, with consonant harmonic choices. The accompaniment, however, is quite different from what such a voice and chords would normally suggest. The bass lines are atypical, dissonances are deliberately introduced into certain chords, and the textural choices contribute to an expression that straddles the line between conventional pop and experimental music.
The analog and digital filters juxtaposed with his guitar produce very different, somewhat off-kilter, almost caricatured sounds, while his colleague Ryan Driver plays softly on the piano, emitting mostly unique synthetic sounds. The sonic environment of these songs is rather conventional in terms of melody and harmony – modern jazz, classic soul, and pop.
For a festival finale, it might not have been the right time to present entirely new material—that is, four songs of about fifteen minutes each, wrapped in long improvisations over slow chord progressions. I firmly believe these new songs will find their way, but their initial performance could have been perplexing.
Some people, in fact, tuned out of these “love songs,” an expression put forward by the artistic director of FIMAV (Scott Thomson), probably without knowing who they were dealing with before showing up at this discovery concert… while others really enjoyed it and applauded warmly.
To achieve unanimity, a different dosage would have been appropriate in my opinion, but anyway, I continue to warmly recommend the music of Eric Chenaux, an absolutely unique creature.
