Les marquises - La battue (2020)

From album to album, Les Marquises has established itself as one of the most original and adventurous projects on the current independent scene. From this singular and radical universe, created by the multi-instrumentalist from Lyon Jean-Sébastien Nouveau, this new album La Battue offers the quintessence. It’s as if all the musical directions taken so far by the group were combined in one abundant sum.

This fourth Marquesas album has a big surprise in store for its production. Jean-Sébastien Nouveau had accustomed us to call on outside musicians to enrich and polish his compositions. He also presented The Marquesas as an open collective, with variable geometry. However, La Battue contrasts sharply with its predecessors, Jean-Sébastien Nouveau having wished to tighten its formula and refocus its work. He composed and arranged this disc in full in collaboration with his acolyte Martin Duru, who already officiated with him within the group Immune. The only two external speakers are the drummer Rémy Kaprielan (Da Break), who toured with Les Marquises for the release of A Night Full Of Collapses, and the percussionist Jonathan Grandcollot (Société Etrange), present from the start. In addition, Jean-Sébastien provides only the vocal parts of the disc. La Battue is a testament to a quest for intimacy, a desire to be naked. From there to talk about a mature album, there is only one step.

After its almost elegiac introduction and as if on hold ("Bare Land"), La Battue revives the intensity of tribal rhythms which are one of the hallmarks of the group. Difficult however to compartmentalize the music of the Marquesas as the genres and codes are blurred here. With great freedom, Jean-Sébastien Nouveau and Martin Duru clear out rarely surveyed musical regions, offering labyrinthine and hypnotic compositions ("La Battue", "The Trap", "Head As a Scree") as well as terrifying or stifling climates ( "Older Than Fear", "Once Back Home"). Familiars of this universe will recognize all the same, in addition to the wild rhythms, the melodic sense of the group, its deep melancholy sometimes ("White Cliff", "Shape The Wheel"). But La Battue is also opening up to new experiments, which are eyeing electro and repetitive music ("Hosts Are Missing"). If Magic Thought had been inspired by jungle visions, this new album rather evokes for its creators landslide and swamp landscapes. However, a swamp is not only a place of isolation: in it swarms with life forms that never stop developing, metamorphosing.

Metamorphosis, both musical and psychic, is perhaps the major theme of La Battue. Moulting, leaving a state, trying to tear oneself from a skin, from a past outer envelope: the words of the disc, deliberately encrypted, mysterious, revolve around obsessive images and memories, which we do not get rid of so easily, and yet which bring into play the possibility of an internal recomposition, of a rebirth to oneself and to the world.

The Magic Thought pouch showed the head of a child encrusted with strange mineral shards. That of La Battue, produced by artist Vergine Keaton and director of the remarkable animated film The Tasmanian Tiger (2018) for which Les Marquises provided the soundtrack, presents the face of an anonymous man, covered with a material just as bizarre, indistinct, and awkward. It is as if we were dealing with the same character who would have grown up, invaded by forces and forms which would have mutated ... La Battue restores both this continuity and this evolution in the trajectory of the Marquesas, as a dazzling summary of adventures in which this unparalleled music immerses us. Unclassifiable and fascinating.