Based on Canadian physician & author Jacques Ferron's book "Gaspe Mattempa", bassist Eric Normad leads a quintet into a mythological audio world with Raphael Arsenault (violin), Philippe Lauzier (bass clarinet), Alexandre Robichaud (trumpet) & Antoine Letourneau-Berger (percussion).
Patterned after Canadian physician and author Jacques Ferron's book Gaspé Mattempa, where he postulated a character whose creation fantasy stems from a purely acoustic phenomenon. The rustling of the trees on the mountain, takes the form of a mythical creature: satan-mattempa or the squalling of the Madeleine, half voodoo character, half-Nordic, Barron's cousin Saturday, holed up in the cold mountains of the Gaspésie imaginary. In the book he wrote:
"Creature noise, always present and absent at the same time, his singing blurs the horizon, the boundary between land, water and air."
Eric Normand works with that material into these 8 musical works, imaginative and complex pieces for improvisation. Though purely acoustic, the works have the feel of bridging worlds into the electroacoustic improv realm, much like the literature they reflect bridges worlds into the mythological. Fascinating.