" data-original-title="" title="">Eve Risser exploits the inherent potential of Faur��'s theme in a puzzling yet fabulous way. While just hinting at it, repetitively retarding it, while tattering it and overwhelming it through intruding heterogeneous sound sources, the theme rises again and again in varied shapes. While all is driven by mechanically ticking sounds, it is discontinuously fanning out as in a sprawling, luxuriating dream. The layers and different 'voices' thereby created by Risser interlock in a unorthodox orchestral way and gradually thicken into a deep groove. Zooming in and out, Risser uses hoketus-like and minimalistic procedures in odd ways. What pianist Christian Wallumnr?d did with solid melody fragments in a six-piece ensemble, Risser is doing here in her very own lively way, solo, with the prepared 'machinery' of an upright piano (piano droit pr��pare �� effets m��canique). The preparations employed go far more than the usual muting or distorting the string sound. A greater variety of sophisticated percussive mechanisms and effects are added here.

Faur��'s song, with its praise of the mysticism (and deceptions) in experiencing nocturnal transitions, is here transformed into its processual version: the music becomes the nocturnal transitions itself, that now take place analogously IN the music. Risser executes and stages this convincingly with great ingenuity. No electronics are used here. She employs mechanical preparations on an upright piano instead and fully exhausts the potentials of it in a piece that wondrously clocks exactly 24:24. It is stunning in its fluent complexity and its loose, jerky, exact non-exactness, thereby creating a relentless attention to the piece's flow. It might be associated in the second half with certain sides of techno, but it is apparently not done for the reason to emulate that acoustically. The 24:24 duration is an apt dosing to pose melody and pulse for lingering in listener's body and mind. Here is a video registration on ARTE TV of "Apr��s un R��ve" from renowned Berlin Jazzfest 2019, one of the few festivals that presented this amazing work. For a radio version: (listen here).

Risser is one of the most agile and creative forces of the younger French generation, operating on a broad scale of activities ranging from duos with drummer