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Eric Bensoussan

Mathieux Gérald JAZZ NOTES MARS 2003
FREQUENCES LIBRES 01 2003
The Human Touch

Two tightrope walkers on the spree for some thirty years on the wings of music have just conceived a turbulent baby called "The Human Touch", which has set itself without complexe in the improbable confluence of jazz and rock, from Kraftwerk and Jimmy Hendrix.

With guitars, bass, keyboard and vocals, Eric Bensoussan who from the age of fourteen has lived on an uninterrupted wave of musical vagrancy, marked by detours, mime and theatre, composition and song, with his guitar as passport and livelihood... At the battery and percussion, Michel Boiton, who has worked with, accompanied and loved so many groups’ musicians of all calibres, in many countries. Having worked so long for musicians whose songs they have caught and collected, those which we whistle and hum, to place them in contexts intended to reveal their inmost depths, both accomplices decided to make a break to develop their own melodies. And that has given rise to a wild and carnival- like CD, warping in attentive zouïes and surprising the listener with showers of sounds, clouds of voices, streams of whispers, oceans of various music, triturated, mixed, stretched to infinity. They created a noisy and bizarre object full of resounding silences, within which irreverent poetry moves within a graduated chaos. Countless sounds bustle, break loose, overlap, then mix to compose a surprising musical landscape, before dissipating in a burning magma which clears the last shocks and the ultimate echos. Eric Bensoussan tells: " I thought of this record as of the raw art, the art of madmen. We put microphones in my recording studio Adb, at Saint-Vérand in Burgundy. We made only one recording each time, without planning anything, and we kept everything, drums, percussions, guitars and synthesizer, Marcel Aubé's Chinese violin, plus our voices, which I fiddle with backwards and forwards, plus a good measure of harmony, this electronic sound spitter thing. " On must take time to digest these fragments of Dadaist invoice, where the fate has the best part. " I, who am nevertheless an arranger, did not think about the harmony. I especially tried to captivate the silences. Within the instrumental parts, it is the interconnection which creates the rhythm. The note is already there before it is played, caught and caressed, and when it stops, the music stays on..."

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Samabe

Universal Music France
2007

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