Eric Brochard & Fabrice Favriou - Derviche

Gregory Edwards, Gapplegate Guitar and Bass Blog

What comes next? Musically? The answer is everything that went before and some that didn't? In the world we live in right now, all awaits if we can but stay safe? Well at any rate the possibilities musically are as wide open as they have been, if you have persistence, courage, and you are willing to explore.

All that must serve as a prelude to a new disk this morning which is a sort of reaffirmation of the possibilities--of the sparse electricity of Psychedelic Trance Drone Avant Rock if you will. I speak of an album by Eric Brochard and Fabrice Favriou, on piccolo-bass and drums, respectively. It is entitled Derviche (Ayler Records AYLCD-165), which is appropriate because it does spin, whirl, go around. It is taking the bass and making it a bit more metal-guitar-like and then spawning a trance drone expansion of beat and sustained chord.

The five "Sequences" that make up the album move around as a wash of beat and drone, a bass chord sequence with plenty of bottom but some treble too, an unrelenting rock drum tattoo that has life and variation to it while never flagging. 

"Sequence III" gives out with another droning motif and the electronic enhancement of the bass makes it sound as if there are organ tones in there as well.

The promo sheet that came with my copy of this CD describes the music aptly as "experimental rock, focusing on bareness as a research tool." The motive and repetitions aim to achieve an "ecstatic point," which is the case if you let it all sway you to an aural space it occupies resolutely and poetically. 

The distorted metallics of droning and re-droning reinforces one's immersion in the aural space of the recording. It is the very opposite I suppose of the frenetic sheets-of-sound chordal barrages of late-50s Coltrane, and we can accept that as another way to occupy musical space without taking sides, surely not something worth choosing one over another to my mind, because indeed we need both.  It has its space and it does the drone barrage admirably well.

I recommend this one for its sheer sensual inter-planetificatory vibes.
If you meet it half-way it will take you out to the edges of outer space, so to speak. Listen!