Turbulence

CD Turbulence Michel Portal

Musician of the ephemeral, the temporary and the unexpected – all of which belong to the true nature of any musician – Michel Portal shows resistance when it comes to recording, both to what it is (fixing sound in time and space) and what it does (setting the cash registers humming).
And what’s more, his resistance is no secret.
Everyone knows that what he really likes are new encounters, being on stage, the tension created by his audience and their attention. And the music he’ll be playing tomorrow.
If he does go into a studio it’s never with a light heart; the silence between instruments and machines takes too much out of him.
Yet he does go in there now and then, doing himself violence (albeit gently), and the music is all the more beautiful for it.
A new record by Portal doesn’t resemble anything else, not even another Portal record.
There are sounds from elsewhere you don’t and won’t hear anywhere else; sounds invented to inspire poets with new ideas and painters with fresh forms, or provide other musicians with special spaces of liberty, whether they’re from a jazz, rock, light music or classical background, researchers, or anything else you might care to name. Like the old language of a world still to be discovered.
But that’s not all: true to his concerts and previous records, this one too has an undeniable island flavour redolent of travel, journeys, dreams. The scent of the desert. The memory of searing cries piercing the Andalusian night, the shadows of dancers carried away by their own dance in some lost corner of the Basque country, the generosity of strangers, journeys, images.
Here, too, it seems as though Portal works like poets and painters do for an anthology or an exhibition, assembling the traces of a particular instant in time and the delicate movements of the heart that enlivened it, and, in his case, all those tunes rendered
so faultlessly here, whose perfect imperfection we so love on stage.
You who fight shy of the record dealers’ full bins, just forget all notions of genres and trends, please. This record is for all those looking for the record that will maybe awaken the desire in them to be a musician – or make them dream of desiring just that.
In other words, this record is for you. And us.
Francis Marmande