Revenge set to music like a movie
As CD sales continue to plummet, artists are finding solutions. The new album by the Samuel Hall Band from the Canton of Vaud is only available in digital form, in sound and video.
We remember the two previous albums, Blood, Bread, Children and Bones and The Big NowhereThe Samuel Hall Band had succeeded in creating a kind of sublime strangeness in people's memories. The band, comprising Marc-Olivier Savoy (drums), Gérald Perera (bass) and Stéphane Pache (guitars), is back with Mission Revengerecorded in March 2013.
As soon as it was composed, it was decided that the album, entirely instrumental, would be recorded live, the project claiming to use loopers, and that it would be intended for digital distribution only (Youtube for the videos, Bandcamp for the audio tracks). In keeping with their cinematic obsessions, the band have chosen to explore one of cinema's most important themes: revenge.
If Mission Revenge undeniably contains features characteristic of "ambient" music, and goes well beyond its restrictive, almost sluggish electronic aspect, not only through the richness of its sonorities, but above all through the narrative obstinacy that characterizes it. The image, the film, is very much present, in a succession of vivid sound scenes that evoke an imaginary, even visual representation.
Against this backdrop of overlapping layers and layers, so dear to the soaring music of the 70s, Samuel Hall Band manages to deploy a whole range of feelings with a powerful presence, inseparable from the elaborate guitar tones, which definitively exclude it from the family of ambient music and suggest its predisposition to trance.
And therein lies the beauty of the project. In its ability to capture the listener's imagination, while at the same time plunging him or her by surprise, sometimes into a suave lancinance, sometimes into the frenzy of a chase. Six pieces between strength and finesse, to be savored.
