Matthieu Metzger - SelfCooking

Eyal Hareuveni, AllAboutJazz

SelfCooking offers a glimpse into the busy mind of a restless musician, French saxophonist Matthieu Metzger. Deep thoughts about weird compositions that have lurked in his memory, accidental explorations while playing with the extended family of saxophones and the joyful cooking of sonic textures, spiced with electronic treatments, some are his own design of real time transformation music software. Metzger— a member of the French (Orchestre National de Jazz) and collaborator of reed player Louis Sclavis and guitarist Marc Ducret— uses this journey as investigation of musical genres, often ones that flirt with unknown sonic terrains.

SelfCooking jumps from one sonic happening to another with no attempt to justify a cohesive unity, or any kind of concept but the pleasure of playing the music. One moment Metzger enjoys developing a playful melody with his sax choir on "Présentez arme" and immediately after, on "La teneur," he explores subtle electronic manipulations of the horns sounds, then mixes the electronic sounds with live horns on "Zozosia" to invent a futuristic abstraction of a Greek dance and moves to an abstract investigation of the sax as a metallic vehicle that moves and transforms wind.

On other tracks Metzger experiments with blending alien and vintage electronic sounds, simply for the fun of doing so. On "Hibernation complexe" and " caressant un rocher" he contrasts gentle melodies with violent, noisy mutations. On "Yamaha mon amour" he mutates sampled percussive sounds till they are transformed into new sounds, and on "Le mort joyeux" he processes his own vocal to add a choral-like quality to it. "Vu de profil l'arrière était sur un côté" is a chaotic pastiche of sounds— metallic, hip-hop, spoken word, be- bop and many more— joined together in a total random cut and paste arrangement.

Often this joyful sonic journey sounds too personal, but most of the time Metzger's passion and sense of invention are indeed full of joy.