Nighturns (deliberate spelling) finally introduces a new album by Bilal Dídac P. Lagarriga aka Un Caddie Renversé dans l'Herbe (lives in Barcelona, born in São Paulo, Brazil, 1976) after several years of silence. Dídac was the first artist on my old Dekorder label back in 2003 so our relationship goes a long way back. He released one album (Like A Packed Cupboard But Quite…) and two 3"CD's on the label to wide critical acclaim. This new album on the Cellule 75 label continues and refines his explorations of African minimalist music played on mbira, kalimba, balaphon, vibraphone, melodica and flute, combined with field recordings of African soundscapes and ritual chants, several collaborations and electronic interventions. Always interested in reductionism (both in melody and rhythm) the music on Nighturns is finally condensed to its essential nucleus and spirituality, tranquil and deeply moving, seemingly at peace with itself, still always evocative.

While previous releases have been compared to the likes of Pascal Comelade, Asa Chang & Junray, early Penguin Café Orchestra and Steve Beresford on Nighturns the African influences are becoming more prominent and the whole album is even more singular, more personal and liberating, more intimate and inimitable.

Nighturns (a transfolk journey)…..

"I adore walking at night across West African sandy and barely illuminated streets. Nighturns is the title of these walks, Nighturns is the name of this album, Nighturns is what the soul needs to overcome all the outer attempts to break it. Night turns into sound.

The following tracks are also memory tracks: a lost and found piano tape recorded in 1995 (my first experiment with music); my wife, then in her late twenties, reciting Indonesian poet Haji Hasan Mustapa on kuring (“oneself, creature”), kurung (“cage, body”) and kurang (“less, insufficiency”); severals walks at night across Mbacke’s Palene neighbourhood, headquarter of Baye Fall Senegalese mystical brotherhood; the lecture of Joseph Campbell’s explanation of Shiva myth and the drum as originator of universe; pupils of a Koranic school reciting devotional poetry before going to sleep; an Arabic radio broadcast recorded at night in my teenager room; the discovery of filipino composer Jose Maceda in one of my so-often nonphysical trips (distravels); vinyl crackles of my grandpa’s afrobrazilian records collection accompanying my child dance; the resisting sound of a broken and old friend mbira twenty years after its first vibration… Memory tracks also draw possible/future ways as dismemory, where distime -the unfitting time- and imagination nourish the notion of “dis” linked to trans. This album tries to encapsulate these memory tracks, but it is a distopy: music always seeps.“

CD in 6-panel cardboard sleeve. Artwork & mastering by Marc Richter.