Ferran Fages - cançons per a un lent retard

Etude
013

Though Fages takes pains to assert that the present album is not a posthumous homage to his father, who died a month after the recording was concluded, and also dedicated it to his father’s caretaker, the music was clearly intended as a reaction to and an observation of what he refers to as “the slow decay of my father’s life”. I take it that it’s safe to translate the title as, “songs for a slow demise”.

I suppose it’s a natural tendency in such situations to create work which might be more accommodating to the person involved, in the case of more abstract-oriented artists, to turn toward more traditional and emotionally evocative formats. Jason Lescalleet, whose magnificent release from last year one can hardly help but recall, included his daughter singing “Molly Malone” and structured his noise-filled tape manipulations into a near programmatic summation of his loss and acceptance. While I’m certainly not familiar with everything Fages has committed to disc (I don’t know his earlier solo recording “a cavall entre dos cavalls”), the pieces on “cançons per a un lent retard” are far more overtly emotional in a traditional sense than anything I’ve previously heard from him, though they’re resolutely clear-eyed and unflinching. It’s some pretty great music.

Though one could easily note the almost mandatory sonic indebtedness to Bailey, Fages (on acoustic guitar throughout) is generally more consonant in approach but no less incisive. Sometimes, as near the beginning of the lengthy “suspense horizontal”, there are clear precedents in “opposite”-era Sugimoto. If anything, however, I found myself thinking of Loren Connors, though minus the blues saturation, substituting instead a Spanish melancholy with tinges of flamenco (occasionally quite clear as in the central portion of :tangent al dit” or much of “gir lent”). On “paraula clau”, Fages, otherwise heard solo, performs an intriguing duet with Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga who is responsible for detuning the guitar on the run, as it were, resulting in a haunting, bleak series of wavering moans, buzzes and taps. Fages tends to stay in the mid to lower range of the guitar, playing harshly plucked single notes against vast, abyssal chords that swallow them whole.

The technical and influential aspects are really secondary, though. The music here is extraordinary, often brutally so. Fages opens himself to the experience of a loved one’s deterioration, neither glancing away in “good taste” or reluctance to face reality nor ignoring the enormous emotional price it’s exacting on him. No pathos, just hard-edged sorrow.

When he closes the disc with “retall llorg”, using perhaps something like an e-bow on the strings to generate layers of morose drones before merging into a slow cascade of dolorous notes, there’s a sense of true exhaustion. It’s not pretty or hopeful, just very true.

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