Fétiches

It is the gesture, immediate, fleeting and singular, which is the driving force behind my compositional approach. The musical gesture is almost magical or incantatory, it summons images, colours, impressions, memories…
Its magician, the musician, reads, interprets, brings into existence another gesture: that of writing.
The music pierces and transforms.
Combining sounds to provoke experience, emotion in the sense of this movement outside of oneself, has always fascinated me. It is undoubtedly all these elements described here (and inherent to music) that attract me and still push me today to want to imagine a new music, or more precisely new articulations or sound experiences.
This record is the fruit of several years of reflection, research, doubts and successes. It is the culmination of a stage in my career marked by the maturation of my compositional technique and my research into the dialogue between pitch and sound, and the development of this dialogue over time,
through a dramaturgy. From my earliest writings, I have sought original and authentic sound material. From a work on the in-between, I try to shape the material, that is to say to modify the perception of sound by playing with of pitch and noise in order to surprise the listener. The “reinvention” of matter is a recurring theme in my work. It is necessarily accompanied by a systematic questioning of the tools upstream of the writing process, in an effort to set it in motion permanently. In a related way, the development of sound material in time and space are preoccupations that have accompanied me since the earliest piece on this disc, Zapping 2, and up to the most recent, Canto, Pour Rita and Le Double (all three of which are new recordings). The exploitation of these two elements conditions my approach and my musical and aesthetic conception.
For this adventure I am accompanied by long-standing partners such as the CRD of Gennevilliers, which hosted the recording of this disc, as well as the Banque Populaire Foundation, sponsor of Cercles and Zapping 2. The performers are also key figures in these compositions: I worked on each piece from its genesis to its I worked on each piece, from its genesis to its creation, in an almost artisanal way with each of them.
Fétiches closes one stage and opens another. It highlights the sound materials, the performers and the instruments that have marked my career as a composer in the manner of those ritual objects that accompany us, protect us, reassure us in our daily lives, and give substance to our fears, our desires and our passions.

Tomás Bordalejo