Arbre Wrap A Tear In Cellophane

WRAP A TEAR IN CELLOPHANE
- Review by Elia Fonti
I don’t know exactly what mangroves are, but I venture into them anyway.
This ecosystem is dense - raw - intertwined at first almost scary.
Getting lost every now and then is comforting.
Especially when one gets lost in the unknown.
Getting lost in these mangroves is comforting, and the deeper I go, the more something begins to feel familiar.
I know that mangroves are plant weaves
Trees rooted in air.
The collective ARBRE appears as I know it but the sound matures
the textures grow denser
more granular
more organic
just as one might reasonably expect
from a band of three gentle spirits in perpetual motion who — logically, in hindsight —
release their new record on Ronin Rhythm Records.
“The loudest words in the room are the ones that are not being said,” says T. Waits about the latest film by J. Jarmusch,
a film that speaks about family.
I spent about a hundred Mondays
listening to the concerts of the founder of RRR and mentor of ARBRE, Nik Bärtsch, and now, while listening to ARBRE’s new record,
I sense familiarity.
This familiarity
I believe
arises precisely from silences
from the notes that are not being played.
In ARBRE’s music I find
geometric forms
and a carefully weighed delicacy
in every sound.
In "Wrap a Tear in a Cellophane"
ARBRE tells us many things
through spacious yet compact music
music that is gentle yet in perpetual motion.
ARBRE tells us much through a musical language that is the intelligible continuation
of the one developed in their previous music from Lunaires - 2022 and Mes épaules seront rivières - 2023.
They tell us much through the (musical) themes of space and the dream world.
They tell us much through their familiar instrumentation and considerably more voice,
which communicates
through sporadic yet articulated lyrics in two French and English — lyrics that speak of space:
of the space between sleep and wakefulness
of the space between emptiness and fullness
of the space between those who are together
of the emptiness between those who have separated from others
or from themselves.
The record begins with "The Clock Won’t Stop"
and ends (or perhaps not, precisely) with "Over and Over".
I interpret this — perhaps unconscious — message
with great pleasure
as the will to search and to refine
that the collective ARBRE continues to display with its third album.
In this record I hear two intertwined feelings:
on the one hand
an inner fragility
that emerges as an entirely natural content of being human
a fragility that surfaces from the very first track
as one enters the mangroves.
On the other hand
I hear deep and solid roots
“underwater roots”
anchored in the core of a sonic ecosystem
that is mysterious and exceedingly precise.
Fragility and roots do not surprise me
when they emerge together in a work of art.
Strange — or rather incomplete — would be
fragility without roots.
In this work by ARBRE
there grows an experience that is almost botanical
which - from a dark and deep place -
seeks sources of light
and
in the end
finds them.