FMP CD 79

Bernard Fontaine

"You could know Christine Wodrascka by her voice, her smiles, her absent-minded presence, her doubts, her confusion, her silences, the strange way she opens a packet of cigarettes, her false vulnerability, her unreasonable love of plastic garden furniture, her dislikes, her misleading calm, her openness to all moments, her slavic-provencal origins, her vainly feigned humbleness, her rigour, the size of her hairslides, the diametre of her ankles, her influences, her wish to sacrifice nothing for… her particular choice of listening, her distant but very real relationship with cooking, her desire not to burn her fingers, her everydayness, her irritations, her hidden demands, her retreats, her way of getting back to the question in hand, her silent compositions, her undisciplined lock of hair ..."

In the strict media sense you will know nothing of all that ... But Vertical will tell you what music can be; something more than an expression all too often estranged by references which are as prestigious as thev are cynicallv contemporary: entertainment, money, mindless, popular, facile, demagogic, insincere, musically correct; this is a music which is ordinarily extraordinary, infra-ordinary, without the constraint, the false modesty, or the coquetries which one all too quickly judges to be feminine traits.

Christine Wodrascka plays the here and now not to put at a distance emotions, thoughts and everyday actions, but on the contrary to aggravate them; in this way Vertical, a metaphor for all that is human, is an interior voyage and an invitation to share in it. So after some hesitation, I abandon myself to Vertical.

I am welcomed by an absence of emotional and musical compromise, by the expression of violence or by the violence of expression ... progressively sweet little nothings take a form, cut themselves off in order to connect; associations and references they convey are driven out to introduce the jubilant explosion of anger, even if this anger later reveals itself to be guilty. Notes become essential, insistently taking their place forcing words to shrivel up, to become nothing more than signifiers emptied of all substance. All that remains is the little drop of mercury in which I attempt to escape; in an effort to control it I try in vain to take it in my fingers but it wants to know nothing other than the metallic sound of an unlikely dancehall harpsichord.

All sorts of mechanisms get rolling around the axe constituted by the musician in a machinery the finality of which will be to break with regularity and repetition.

Applause takes me from my true communication, that which is satisfied only by the real, the organic, the innermost interior, wanting nothing to do with all the parasites generated by our in adapted brains. I take advantage of this return to reality to interrogate music for saying music; music as language but a language without rules, without algorithms, requiring all the more an attentive ear, ready to drift, ready to be curious, ready to be warped.

I again find myself amongst the secret interrogations and responses of Vertical.

A return to the blues which awaken me, nothing distressing, just a pleasant dive into depression, not that which destroys, but that which melts; as a way of talking to me about the heart - both the meagre pump and the machine of sentiments -, as a way of frightening me with the horrible banality and of daily life, as a way of believing that music could sweeten social mores, as a way of holding forth on the cultural fracture, as a way of saying I love you so as not to say I hate you, as a way of convincing myself that I could stop smoking, as a way of believing only in the mundane…as a way of laughing. The music ends and, I try to recover some impressions, not those that had been but those I believed to exist.

Christine Wodrascka's Vertical is more than a recording on a certain date, it is the trace of a route/quest/itinerary which will tomorrow be different. As for me on leaving this musical journey, I lift my eyes towards the cat on the first floor who lovingly watches the pigeon on the second and my only desire is to go out and to feel the drop of rain which will make me say: 'it rains therefore I am'.

Translator unknown

zurück / back