After several ep releases on various labels and netlabels (mandorla, archipel, iod) since 2004, Alexandre Navarro is proud to release his first CD album "ARCANE" for SEM label.
ARCANE means esoteric, hidden or mysterious... While not necessarily a conceptual approach for the album, ARCANE creates this sense of mystery through a blend of electric guitar experimentation, melody and field recordings.
A guitarist since the age of 15, Alexandre Navarro has been working with electronic tools for several years (laptop, sampler, software...). For this album, however, he found it necessary to make more of a direct connection with the music; more organic, lofi and instrumental, where the guitar naturally played a central role throughout the recording of the album. With the exception of a few other instruments (organ, sampler, flutes), the album was exclusively recorded with a microphone, a guitar, a valve amp and some effects.
In some ways, ARCANE has something tribal and primitive at its core. It is direct and essential, addressing the mysteries of creation, birth, death, life in general, in a poetic and nostalgic way.
Alexandre Navarro is guitarist, composer and independent producer.
Born in 1974 and raised in Bordeaux, now living in Paris, France.
Besides his studies in anthropology, specialising in history of ideas and religions, he studied electroacoustics and concrete music at cnr (conservatoire national de région).
He composed for different labels/netlabels (archipel, mandorla, iod), art projects, various exhibitions and some supported by the "fonds national d'arts contemporains" (fnac), which were shown all over the world.
He's also the founder of SEM label in 2007 in association with Sacha Vojvodic.
Following a series of MP3 and CD-R releases, the first full-length CD release from French composer/guitarist Navarro on his own label SEM is a decidedly minimalist construction. Built almost entirely around soft guitar strums and laptop manipulations, plus the odd organ, flute and sampler for added layers, these 10 understated pieces of music are laced with moments of true beauty, as the gentle guitars build, loop and repeat around and within the wider electronic, cinematic ambience. Quite simply, wonderful. John S >Link
THE MILK FACTORY
Sometimes it’s almost like cheating, when an electric
guitarist uses a decent delay line. From Windy &
Carl’s sublime arctic drones to The Edge’s epic
chord slaps, the right kind delay and reverb combination can transform
even a scant few plucks of the instrument into divine swirls of ambient
bliss. Then again, as with most easy techniques, true mastery of such
washed-out guitar ambience is rare to come by; for every Flying Saucer
Attack, there are ten staid sets of snoring aimless drones, counting on
such engulfing effects to take over for compositional strategy.
Enter Alexandre Navarro, just so being one of those masters. The
snow-peaked resonances on Arcane, his latest release, and the second
for the SEM label (already off to a good start with The Green
Kingdom’s debut in 2007), are sounds made for treasuring.
This is that special album that won’t be very popular, but
will mean the world to those who get it, and I’m not talking
about purchase.
Let’s start with Mystical Lane, the de facto
“single” cut, and one of the most gorgeous tracks
on an album ridden with them. A flute sounding synth (which could very
well be more manipulated guitar) treads delicately amidst gentle
showers of staccato guitar delays, gradually revealing an expansive
lower end. Lane is far too gripping in a melodic sense to work as new
age fluff, as a slightly melancholy progression engages in the chord
equivalent of point-counterpoint, instruments speaking to a naturally
intriguing ebb and flow. Following Lane, we’re treated to
Awaken, a more hauntingly sparse number, again engaging the breathy
woodwind sound, and accentuating the crumbling sounds of static
interference. This digital forest floor crunching manages to be almost
attention-grabbing, compared to the restraint-beyond-restraint of the
guitar, threatening at any moment, to burst out of its aural closet.
It’s a kind of suspense that needs no actual sounds of fear
to work.
No masterpiece of ambient guitar would be complete without a title
referencing the sun, and The Dawn captures the proper mixture of hope,
fatigue, and contemplation associated with this surreal changing of the
skylights. Replicating the slow crescendo of a sunrise, the layers of
guitars and steady, muted kick drum pulse grow louder and more complex,
before resting in the lighted comfort of the metaphorical day. Eolite,
by contrast, is a fitting dusk (despite appearing earlier in the
album), as the treble swell of delayed guitar splinters off into a
comforting bass series with guitar pushed to the sides. The warm womb
of night appears in the form of such a melting bass sound, losing
layers of complication until fading away by the end.
Like most gorgeous ambient discs, Arcane doesn’t lend itself
easily to explanation of the fairest of criticism through the written
word. Suffice it to say this is beauty with a fragile and temperamental
soul, and if that fails to captivate you, well then, it’ll
still be my little secret.
-David Abranavel >Link
VOXPOP
Ce premier album laisse entrapercevoir un potentiel considérable (déjà présumé au travers des différents Ep produits ces 3 dernières années) tant cette poésie instrumentale, enlaçant nappes et arpèges éthérés de guitares à un minimum mais efficace chapelet d'effets électroniques et de fields recording, prend aux tripes (le bouleversant "Mystical Lane") et file le frisson ("The Dawn").
Tirant ainsi des perspectives optimistes sur des axes plutôt contondants, Navarro propose avec "Arcane" une musique downtempo qui, si elle s'acoquine sans soucis de quelques douceurs écarlates (l'idyllique ambient de "Time"), semble parfois bien au contraire préférer les recoins les plus sombres (l'inquiétant "Primal").
Des atmosphères ambivalentes faisant malgré tout bloc et définissant avec minutie les contours d'un espace, ajouré et intime, offert ici en partage.
Un beau geste donc, et de belles promesses. Que rêver de plus ?
>Link
AUTRES DIRECTIONS
Même si Alexandre Navarro est un habitué des netlabels (ses productions sont parues sur pour le compte de Mandorla, Archipel ou iod), l’écoute d’Arcane, son premier album disponible sur support physique, n’en constitue pas moins une véritable découverte. En effet, le parisien d’adoption a délaissé tout attribut électronique pour se concentrer sur des compositions célestes et organiques.
Outre ce changement de cap, la production plus ambitieuse permet une qualité d’écoute qui sied bien mieux à ce type de musique. Arcane se dévoile ainsi de préférence sur une chaîne hi-fi et à un certain volume sonore. Mais, plus encore que ce pré-requis matériel, la musique de Navarro nécessite tout particulièrement une écoute à des moments bien particulier - de préférence, la nuit tombée et en solitaire. Alors les plages instrumentales tissées par cet orfèvre offrent une profondeur de champ insoupçonnée de prime abord.
C’est que malgré, une instrumentation presque toujours réduite à son plus simple appareil (une guitare passée par le filtre d’effets divers et quelques habillages ambiant), ses compositions présentent une puissance évocatrice comparable à celles de Labradford. Chaque plage instrumentale dépasse allègrement le registre du simple field-recording, transcende le carcan de la musique ambiante minimale, en mettant en valeur le motif mélodique central. Fluide et sensuelle, la musique Alexandre Navarro joue sur la répétition et l’ondulation, pour mieux se lover au creux de l’intime.
>Link
CYCLIC DEFROST
Previous to his debut-proper Arcane, Paris-based Alexandre Navarro
spent much of his career as a producer connecting with electronic and
synthetic elements across assorted releases on traditional and net
labels. Yet despite these initial forays, Navarro is first and foremost
a guitarist – and it’s clear from the opening
strains of ‘Time’. Delayed loops sashay across each
other, their warmth and melody cascading into a melange of sheer beauty.
In a similar vein to Antony Harding (July Skies) and Robin Guthrie,
Navarro highlights the fragility of common experience, memory and
yearning in his otherworldly compositions. Pedals, valve amps, organ
and flute create this discernible sound, with field recordings also
entering the fray a little later on. At times, the fragility of
Navarro’s instrumentation is eerily apparent, especially on
‘Awaken’ as effervescent static threatens to
overtake the delicacy of his guitar progressions.
‘Flying in a Dream’ is resplendent in its duelling
echoes, making light work of the intense fluctuations around the
intermittent samples. Towards the end, the multifaceted title track
acts as a reprise (of sorts) of ‘Time’, a
ridiculously simple melody coated in lashings of reverb. It concludes
with the immediacy of water running – a beautiful, if
predictable way, to end the album neatly. So when the real finale
‘Bulles’ begins, the heaving tones almost scare the
gentle tempo steadily built up over the album into submission, forcing
it to scurry away across the temporal space.
However, the hidden track is the most peculiar of all, a dark, almost
danceable number that collects a shifting melody alongside a scrunching
jazz beat. Tantalisingly short, and at odds with what came before, it
is immensely satisfying and makes the journey toward it all the more
astounding. Arcane embeds itself into your consciousness, acting as a
luscious bridge between visceral and cerebral experience, and cements
Navarro as a truly gifted composer.
In our everyday lives, we often have to confront an extremely limited
vocabulary when talking about music. Faced with questions, people often
tend to respond with elusive adjectives; words are unwound even before
we end up facing a piece of paper with a pencil in hand. And yet,
sometimes that piece of paper turns out to be our greatest enemy, for
a new names can frequently force our
minds to be as blank as the paper we are staring at. For that matter,
France’s Alexandre Navarro brings forth Arcane –
ten simple reasons for why silence is almost always more blaring than
words.
Throughout his album, two guitars in perfect harmony explore silence
and every inch of its tonalities. Then, unforeseen electronics kick in
as a calibrator, determining not a mood, but a specific space and time;
thus Arcane reveals itself as surprisingly cinematic. All tracks follow
a well-determined pattern, slowly drawing the listener in while
offering no sense of melancholia, just nostalgia for places one has
never visited. Navarro’s music exhibits an incredible freedom
of choice: it is as though every single note was shot on celluloid, but
when screened numberless films come into sight. From scraps of ethereal
nature to lost towns in unheard of countries and the impression of a
sung haiku in “The Dawn,” the album has every
solution covered in case of a breakdown of time.
A swarm of textures emerge into a sardonic yet beautifully crafted
ritual – a mere allusion for our daily routine. Oblique as
Arcane may be, there pervades no feeling of pretentiousness; every
track is reduced to the bare minimal, where the route is known
beforehand and they rise no expectation whatsoever. All ten of them add
up in a tranquil and rarefied climax, building up skyscrapers that stud
a secluded city in a perfect but improbable future.
For an ambient album, Arcane transpires as unexpectedly upbeat. While
it does examine all possible changes of heart in a fifth season, not
for a second does it replace its optimistic character with a plaintive
one, ultimately bestowing the record’s refinement. Repetition
here acts as something far from frustrating, for in many ways it is
what stores the perfect balance all tracks acquire. If anything, one
must find a comfort zone in order to be able to stand hearing the whole
album, which has become an incredibly difficult thing to do in our
modern times; but if somehow you discover that place where reality is
less distorted, you’ll find that time does stop sometimes,
even if just for fifty-three minutes and thirty seconds.
Longtemps affilié à la scène netaudio, auteur de divers eps disséminés sur de nombreux netlabels (Mandorla, Archipel…) Alexandre Navarro poursuit son aventure musicale en produisant cette fois un album destiné à être distribué en CD sur son label SEM. Si ce passage à la musique “en dur” ne change en rien sa conception de la musique, en revanche au niveau de la composition il se re-centre sur la guitare, instrument duquel il va tirer toute la substance pour donner vie aux dix compositions de l’album” Arcane”.
Délaissant pour un temps, on l’imagine, les compostions entièrement électroniques, Alexandre Navarro guitariste depuis toujours, a construit ce nouvel album autour de motifs de guitares passés au delay, retravaillés ensuite au laptop et auxquels il a ajouté des fields recordings (bruits de l’eau, des oiseaux…), des sonorités et parasites divers, ainsi que quelques sons d’instruments épars (flute, orgue…) que l’on pourra reconnaître ici ou là.
Il ne faudra donc pas plus deux ou trois écoutes pour constater tout le mystère et la beauté d’un album qui révèle une grande pureté et évoque, à la manière des musiques Labradford ou One Mile North, les grands espaces vierges naturels.
Album de guitare ambient par excellence, “Arcane” joue sur les effets de répétition, sur la progression, sur l’aspect enivrant produit par les harmonies claires et lumineuses qui se développent et qui nous enveloppent, tout entier, comme dans un cocon sonore des plus agréables qui soient.
“Arcane”, un album fait pour rêver. >Link
VAINZINE
So what is Arcane? It instantaneously reminded me of some of the greatest downtempo producers of recent times including Ulrich Schnauss. But without actually sounding like a copy cat artist.
Navarro is undeniably musically gifted and has a concise knowledge of what sounds go together and harmonise effectively and efficiently creating a textured, detailed, diverse yet minimal downtempo, electronic, chill out sound that will appeal to all and sooth the soul. The opener 'Time' is a perfect example of Navarro's ability to mix music with intellectual prowess.
>Link
TEXTURA
Though he's worked with electronic tools for many years, Paris-based guitarist Alexandre Navarro wanted to make a more immediate and direct connection with Arcane's material and so chose to strip the album's sound to its essence by using little more than guitar, microphone, valve amp, field recordings (nature sounds of birds and water), and effects (organ, flute, and sampler are used sparingly too). While “arcane” means “esoteric, hidden or mysterious,” the album material isn't actually mysterious at all if understood in that enigmatic sense; rather it constitutes an admirably direct and accessible listen. A guitarist since fifteen, Navarro could no doubt grandstand if he chose but he opts instead to construct meditative settings heavy on delicately woven textures and loops.
The album begins quietly with dreamily atmospheric strums and graceful peals in “Time” and a similar delicate approach characterizes “Primal” with its spiraling guitar waves and bird chatter. Gentle clicks and ripples of static course through “Awaken” and “Mystical Lane,” both of which are rendered even more tranquil with the subtle addition of whispered flute melodies, while subtle organ touches help warm “Flying in a Dream.” Imagine Fennezs's extensive experimental tool-kit cleansed of rawness and distortion and instead deployed with the pursuit of placidity in mind and you're close to imagining Arcane's sound.
>Link
ANGRY APE
Parisian imprint SEM Label impressed recently on debut outing The Green Kingdom, performed by Detroit-based musician Mike Cottone. The follow-up comes in the shape of, SEM co-founder, Alexandre Navarro’s ten-track 'Arcane' which, after years on the net-audio scene, is his first CD release. While Navarro sings from the same hymn sheet as Cottone, incorporating a fondness for lush, repetitive guitar textures, lingering found sounds and other soft nuances, 'Arcane' retains a distinctive edge that helps to separate each release, while staying true to the concepts of pastoral beauty founded upon SEM’s first issue.
Navarro’s particularly pleasing brand of guitar and bucolic field recordings collaging feels as fresh as a crisp summer morning. The invigorating, cascading tranquility of pieces such as 'Time', 'Bulles' and 'Eoilte' ripple with shimmering harmonics much like a reflection of a sunrise across a river bed. The synth-like textures on 'Primal', although seemingly constructed using heavily treated guitar, reminds of German synth- pioneers Tangerine Dream especially around their 'Rubycon' phase.
The title track, meanwhile, inspires imagery of nature, as Navarro weaves recordings of footsteps crunching through leafy field paths and landscapes strewn with freshwater streams, around a softly spun framework of gliding guitar. Both 'Awaken' and 'The Dawn', on the other hand, add depth and variety, with the former incorporating hisses of subtle static while the latter utilizes pulsing heartbeats to ensure 'Arcane' doesn’t stagnate for too long in the one area.
Like Cottone’s Green Kingdom project, Alexandre Navarro displays an articulate talent for transporting the listener on a journey. A journey that is left entirely open to interpretation. Navarro simply paints his colours on a blank canvas leaving it exposed for you to fill in the blanks and discover his world all on your own. >Link
KRINEIN
Guitariste d’origine bordelaise, celui-ci a
étudié au conservatoire
l’électro-acoustique et la musique
concrète tout en poursuivant des études
d’anthropologie… On le voit collaborer pour
différents labels (Mandorla, Archipel, Iod)
réalisant quelques EPs, performances et autres expositions
soutenues notamment par le Fonds National d'Art Contemporain. Fondateur
de SEM label en compagnie de Sasa Vojvodic, il sort sur cette
structure, Arcane un premier album envoûtant. De nappes de
guitares en traitements sur son ordinateur portable, celui-ci
crée des paysages mystérieux qui
évoluent lentement de manière presque
ésotérique. Instrumentaux organiques,
plongés dans un temps comme suspendu. Minimaliste aussi bien
dans sa conception, son enregistrement que dans son rendu, cet album
mise à juste titre sur les sensations qui vont
s’emparer de l’auditeur réceptif.
Importance de l’âme, des sentiments primitifs tels
que la naissance, la mort, les mystères de la
création. Une poésie mélancolique qui
en quelques arpèges fait naître
l’hypnose. >Link
etherREAL
Alexandre Navarro est un artiste français qui, depuis
quelques années déjà, s’est
fait remarqué en tant qu’instigateurs de plusieurs
netlabels de qualités (EKO Netlabel, Standard Klik Music),
avant de passer au format CD en créant SEM Label et en
regroupant ses deux précédents netlabels sous une
seule bannière nommée iod, nouveau netlabel sur
lequel on retrouve toutes les sorties EKO et SKM. Allez-y les yeux
fermés, on y trouve des perles. Comme on n’est
jamais aussi bien servi que par soi-même, c’est
donc sur son propre label qu’Alexandre Navarro sort son album
après avoir laissé l’honneur de la
première sortie à
l’Américain Mike Cottone et son projet The Green
Kingdom dont nous parlions il y a quelques mois.
Difficile de savoir pour l’instant si la ligne directrice de
SEM va rester sur ce même tracé, mais si
c’est le cas on se dirige vers une extrême
cohérence. En effet à
l’écoute de cet Arcane et en relisant notre
chronique de The Green Kingdom, on a l’impression que
l’on pourrait écrire exactement la même
chose. Alexandre Navarro produit une musique principalement
basée sur des guitares dont le son est tellement clair,
limpide, lumineux, qu’il en devient presque
électronique. Égrenages souvent assez rapides,
réverbérations dans lesquelles
l’auditeur vient se perdre, des boucles
répétitives infinies jusqu’à
en devenir hypnotiques. Post-rock lumineux ou electronica acoustique,
quelque soit la façon de voir les choses il y a dans cette
musique une composante ambient, que ce soit dans les
répétitions minimales que l’on pourra
comparer à Brian Eno, ou de manière plus
classique quelques field recordings bucoliques, chants
d’oiseaux et bruits de rivière.
Arcane est une magnifique invitation au voyage, tendance mental comme
le confirment quelques titres (Karma Debut, Mystical Lane, Awaken,
Flying In A Dream). L’ensemble est très
homogène, le principe est a peu près le
même sur chaque titre : divers strates de guitares que ce
soit pour créer des nappes ou mélodies de cordes
pincées, parfois un accompagnement électronique
(souffles, nappes), et des effets que l’on devine
généralement assez présents afin de
faire suffisamment varier la teinte de chaque morceau. Si ce squelette
paraît quelques fois un peu dépouillé
(manque d’inspiration ?), il est au contraire en
général joliment habillé de
réverbérations envoûtantes (Time),
d’une tonalité plus grave (Primal),
d’une complexe imbrication du jeu de guitare et
d’effets donnant une impression de tension (Eolite), fins
crépitements (Awaken), pulsations de basses profondes
(Flying In A Dream, Bulles).
Vous l’aurez compris, Alexandre Navarro nous a
séduit et devrait séduire tout amateur
d’ambient lumineuse.
Fabrice Allard
>Link
FREDERIC DRUOT ARCHITECTURE
Music composed for a retropspective of 20 years of Design: Los Angeles, Saint Etienne, Seoul, Taipei. Directed by Frederic Druot.
