no tongues | ici @ jazz news (by)

"Makam Fantôme" is the first single taken from "ICI" the new outstanding album by French collective No Tongues to be released November 25 via Ormo, Carton Records and Pagans.

To open the senses, poetic senses, physical senses, to a sensitive world within ear's reach. Ordinary or extraordinary sounds, sounds that immerse us, call to us, give us rhythm, reassure us, fill us with wonder, sounds that polish our deep vibrations, the very ones from which music emerges, an indestructible link between the mystery inside and the mystery outside, a vibratory act that unfolds and connects our worlds to the invisible.

Using their instruments to open sounds from the outside is what constitutes the matrix of No Tongues, created in 2015. On their 1st record "Les Voies du Monde", they focused on an anthology of voices collected by ethnomusicologists and created their unique sound through the practice of deep, physical listening. Forged over centuries, these original voices are the source of an instrumental sampling work seeking to open the sound palette and leave the voices' trace in the listener's body. The substance of each song then unfolds through the orchestra- tion of instrumental timbres in quasi-electroacoustic domains, and the extrapolation of deep musical structures from these extracted sources.

In 2019, fascinated by the link between human environment and the music that it generates, they decided to confront themselves with a Great Elsewhere, spending 7 weeks in the Amazonian forest, with the Teko and Wayampi indigenous people of Guyana, to create "Les Voies de l'Oyapock".

Discovering someone else's world is always a roundabout way of searching for one's own.

Then came the clear need to confront themselves and their practice to what was right there, right HERE (ICI): the sound of drizzle on a skylight, a spring fire in La Caillère, chimes in Bono's cinerary garden, the beep of the paw patrol phone, a jogger, a faucet, Patrick's bees, the oven before the pizza, a TGV, children's voices, a belt sander, the polyrhythmic drips falling from a wet sweater...

Each musician collected sounds they liked, those which sprung from their lives, invited friends to offer songs (Linda Oláh, Isabel Sörling, Elsa Corre, Loup Uberto), and opened their ears freely in every direction.

Then began the work of collective creation. The No Tongues method means slipping into the collected sounds several weeks before entering the studio, many elements having been worked on and developed, but with no pre-existing piece. Four weeks of sound recording and compo- sition in the studio (excluding mixing), offered the band time enough to enter a new creative process, fully immersed in the sound grain as a musical source with editing and post-production tools readily available.

This new opus ICI opens aesthetic breaches within the group's identity, in particular with the arrival of electric and electronic sounds, as up until now everything was produced acoustically. It testifies to an ICI that is intimate with and open to the world, to a need for expiatory vibrations, ritual sounds to heal, to fight, to share, carried by the commitment of a band of musicians looking for their place of sound, their roles as human beings thrown into a crazy reality, with only their instruments, their ears and the honesty of their awakened presence as weapons.

ICI will be released on November 25 on Ormo, the band's historic label, but also on Pagans, a label sensitive to that which springs from the friction of the modern and the secular, and the label Carton, one of the spearheads of experimental and creative music in France.