Léon Aphar & Ivann Cruz - Aphar's Cave (2023) Hi Res

With Aphar’s cave, Léon Aphar develops in duet with Ivann Cruz the techniques of musical collages and superpositions of disaparate sources he began to explore alone with his first album, Ghost songs.

The canva of the album is peppered with echoes from an album of Nick Cave that Léon Aphar closely listened during his youth. Most of those signals are but shadowed and blurred, which make appear other sources in the foreground : Aphar’s songs, or traces of a more distant past. There can be found a fragment of a Franz Schubert’s lied, a Ma Rainey’s blues, a traditionnal folk song or a gospel.

With this choice of a certain density of texts and musics, simply driven by their guitar and their voice, Léon Aphar and Ivann Cruz explore semantic and aesthetic saturations. Here and there, additional parts on the record amplify the process.

The disc is built with nine songs featuring characters adrift, parallels to nine dreams carried by some chords that can be heard along the ghost album nested in Aphar’s cave. Nine short stories, like a travel for a night, or for a disc. Two main slopes. One is black, the other out of category.