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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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..."
The ten titles, crumbled, torn, scratched and scraped, which follow one another on this CD, navigate
between free jazz and concrete music, with a large rhythmic and harmonious complexity, calling to
mind Franck Zappa, King Crimson, and David Bowie.
Eric and Michel also play their opus on stage, together with François Delage, his bass, and with the
sound engineer Thierry Cousin, for the technical effects. An enormous pleasure lived like
Madmen!
Yvan Jossen
L’AVANT SCENE 02 2003
« Sur les rayons »
Eric Bensoussan, who had imagined for the scenery music of Dieu merci, on ne meurt qu’une fois, of
Monique Enckell ( Avant-Scène N°934) smog waves of sonorous, sheets of mystery, has just brought
out a CD The Human Touch, which as its name indicates, evokes the notions of spaces touched up by
the man. Inhabited with " a grain of Dadaism ", this album will please all those who concretize the
abstract and put tactile sensations in
the music.
D. D. Danielle Dumas
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