saåad: verdaillon

Toulousian's Romain Barbot and Gregory Buffier have produced more than a dozen tormented ambient-drone records under the name Saåad. Verdaillon is the fruit of a commission by the local Les Orgues festival, which gave them access to the Puget organ located in the Church of Notre-Dame de la Dalbade. Via dynamics of elevation, suspension and tension, Saåad's music aims for altered states. Consisting of thick patches of sound, it gathers powerful harmonies and buries them under the rustle of elusive, intimate, far-flung sampling. From the start, Saåad has been obsessed with in situ creation, field recording and acoustics, but also, more implicitly, with baroque music. So their encounter with the Dalbade organ seemed a propitious challenge. Even in the sparkling main themes, the organ seems unevenly tuned, at times granular, with a range of concrete, percussive and eolian expression. Sometimes the organ is played when it is off; a couple of tracks utilize spare old pipes, like flutes. Verdaillon eschews the easy lyricism of much ambient music, in favor of an extremely rare quality of dynamic and detail. The record's singular and discreet beauty is due to the organ in all of its most secular aspects, and to a certain 'something in the air' of that particular place, on those particular days... the breath of life itself.