October 23rd, 2013, Nantes
Ghosts take musicians to a parallel world: the sound world. They’re on an intergalactic journey. They wake up in a tree. Music geniuses spin around them. Aborigines are singing and dancing, and invite them to play. They play. Near a fire, a strange music. Imaginary people come alive in the fire. They play a cat and mouse game. Everybody sleeps. The day after, they are awakened by lions and leaves. Aborigines and lions mate. They dance very fast, very very very fast. They dance all possible dances at the same time. A shaman comes in. He speaks. He plays imagination, his instrument, when he speaks. Musicians don’t know what it is. But they play too. Dance stops. Musicians leave. Aborigines-lions babies offer beautiful flowers. They leave for the desert, it’s monotonous. They forgot to bring water, but not their instruments. They are desperate, but they play. They are hallucinating, but they still see the keys, the strings, and the skins. They see their basses ascend in to the sky.
October 24th, 2013, Poitiers
And then they see all sorts of fantastic animals going in every direction. Some fly, others walk. They are hallucinating. But to think that their friends and families are beyond the dunes keep their spirits up. They drop from exhaustion. Much later, they are awakened by nomads – to be more specific: fools (like them). But not the same kind of fools. Fools who mumble and reduce them (the musicians) to slavery again. They carry them for days, and days. They wake up, some panic, others suggest they stay calm because they have a plan. The plan: to play, to play without stopping, all the time. Two weeks after, they still play. Three weeks, four weeks. Then the nomads decide to speak to them and they reconcile with them (between fools). Everybody plays while walking, while running, until the slave market. They say goodbye, but the musicians are still sold as slaves. They escape two days after, because they make jazz and there’s no room for them in Vivaldi’s world. They walk through Kabylie. They arrive in the Valley of Monkeys. They sing and they play with the monkeys. They question them (to speak with them, you just have to play, and to blink). March starts again. It rains. Everybody sweats with cold. Then musicians wake up in Poitiers, playing in front of me and others. I listen…
Octobre 26th, 2013, Avignon
Here we go again with an imaginary story! Musicians gallop on a penguin until the North Pole. They meet with a tribe again, but this time they are from an Inuit community, and they come out of igloos of fire. They look like zombies. They are sad. Musicians play for them, but it doesn’t change a thing. So they play louder, and, to their great surprise, Inuit people start to play with them, vociferously, softly, sadly, joyfully, nicely, messily… In any case, they play, the music of the fools.
Oscar Pierrepont