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For nearly 15 years, I’ve been collecting music in my drawers. Bits of
melodies, half-finished pieces, a few chords thrown hastily onto a sheet
of paper. It was necessary for someone at the other end of the world (for
Belgium, Japan is at the other end of the world) to ask me to release
a CD there, for me to put together all these musical bits and pieces and
give them, at last, a shape and a face. If this music has been in my drawers
for so long, it may be because here in Belgium, I didn’t know where it
belonged. Not jazz, nor what one may call contemporary music, nor pop,
nor chanson… Maybe a bit of everything, maybe something else. It seems
to me that by releasing a CD so far from home, these questions would be
allowed to fade and that it would be enough to say that it is all simply
music, my music.
More precisely, this is the music which comes to me most effortlessly.
At the risk of giving in to certain clichés, I must say that this is the
music which comes to me as I am walking down the street, or absent-mindedly
driving in my car. Music which surfaces naturally, without being summoned.
And it is so irresistible, because it brings me back to my adolescence,
and even my childhood, during which I have had the good fortune of being
swept away by music, which was a living part of me, haunting me, relentlessly
calling upon me. At the time I was not aware that to live thus, in a world
filled with sounds, was extraordinary. I believed it to be the norm. Later,
adulthood attempts to persuade us that reality is altogether something
far more serious.
Today, it is this music which has become a stronghold against the commonplace
banal reality of the world.
This is why this album may very well be the most personal I have ever
made. Because it reaches what is most natural within myself. It springs
from my oldest emotions, the most mysterious, the most unconscious ones.
Although recorded with a certain urgency, a great calmness seems to emanate
from this music. Much like the pervasive longing for a lost world to which
music allows, from time to time, an entrance, a door to an elsewhere which
remains forever elusive. This music attempts to grasp behind the world’s
façade something else, which our grown-up eyes can no longer see. It attempts
to read between the lines what is not said but which we can perceive if
only we know how to listen.
Between the lines…
Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven
-tracklist-
01. Leaving Valparaiso
02. Falling Star 1
03. Falling Star 2
04. Falling Star 3
05. Falling star 4
06. Gus
07. Lost Paradise
08. Northern lights
09. Moon Smile
10. Toinou
11. A Kiss by the Sea
12. Between the Lines
13. Dust's Hope
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