Percussions.org

[Nancy Huston]

These guys are crazy - they think you can make beauty with whatever comes to hand - catch a rhythm passing through the air and fool around with it - stir up a sound wave and surf on it - crawl all over the web at night like sound spiders...

These guys are crazy - they think you can understand other cultures from the inside and the outside at the same time.

These guys are crazy - they think you can bring two geniuses together and make it work - combine a solo violin with a bunch of old crates and gourds and stones and make it work. What an outlandish idea !

These guys are crazy - they think they've got whole new worlds to share and invent together and they're right.

How is such a thing possible? You listen to it once, twice - hey what's going on here? I've neyer heard anything like this before - and then you can't stop listening to it, it grows on you, grows in you, your throat goes on humming it and your feet tapping it long after it stops.

François Kokelaere and Paul Lazar. Utterly obsessed with sound. Two young men who've been living eating drinking sleeping music as far back as their memories can stretch. Last year - somewhere in central France - a chance encounter. It might not have happened, but once it has happened it's hard to prevent words like "predestination" from jumping into your head.

Not that the two men resemble one another; they don't. The percussion performances of François Kokelaere are in many ways "out of this world", that is, the world oftime and history. He's involved in the timeless rhythms ofthe earth, the cosmos; his very heartbeat and lungswell are in harmony with the techniques he acquired during his years in Africa, years whose unfolding had littie to do with date books and alarm clocks because Africa doesn't work that way. He knows the secret musicality of silence, the thrumming of birds the humming of insects the drumming of mortar and pestle... repetition variation dependability solidity...

If Kokelaere's music is the moving vibrating living earth on which Man carves out his path in Time, then Lazar is that Man: his instrument is a high emblem of Western civilization and his talent has been honed in the classical Western way ofusing it - but here he turns that training into pure expressiveness and the violin becomes an instrument of anxiety and ecstasy, fear and folly; he screams with it, sings and dances with it; sometimes the strings he's bowing seem to be his very nerves, high strung, tautly strung, it's as if the violin were plugged directly into his unconscious so that when he plays, it speaks to us straight from the heart, the gut, the crotch, the deep black hole of mortal loneliness; Kokelaere with his stones and calabashes and health food and peaceful grin is the body close to nature, the bubbling irrepressiblejoy of nature, he can spend long afternoons sitting on a rock in a river and watching the water rush and gurgle by, the sky change colors, whereas Lazar can spend long nights in front of a computer screen, exploring a virtual world as far away from nature as possible, plucking not fiowers but reverberations in the void, rhythms, samplings, new ways of working with sound, pushing mind and body to their limits, soaring on unexpected spurts of energy, jiving on fatigue.

François is to Paul as African contemplation is to European striving - or Buddhist kharma to Christian tragedy... Thus, despite their incredible versatility (the pieces recorded here evoke musical styles ranging from the West Indian biguine to the Arabian nights), what you hear when you listen to these two musicians is not "world music" with its often facile exoticism; rather, it is music that miraculously bridges the gap between two worlds. Moving from piece to piece, you can distinguish between those in which the artists ask their instruments - however improbable this may seem - to do more or less the same thing, (Gongomaviole), and the ones in which they stretch the distance between them toits dangerous maximum Kryn'Sviole).... without ever losing sight and sound of each other.

This is dialogue in the fullest sense ofthe word: an exchange in which both speak and both listen. A rare thing indeed.

These guys are crazy and I love them - there's neyer enough of their sort ofcraziness in the world.

Nancy Huston

This record is available on Buda Records