Tony: Itinérances
Autres directions in music

The end of a romantic relationship appears to have been the impetus for Tony Cesbron's Itinérances. As a way of coping with the vacuum created by his lover's absence, Cesbron took to the road where musical collaborations with different people followed throughout the trip. Aside from noting that Cesbron “works from pieces of sound taken when he meets people” and that he “likes to arrange sounds, re-orchestrate them, (and) cut them to stick them back together,” little information beyond song titles is given, leaving the listener to speculate upon the who, what, and where.

A sketchy quality reigns throughout much of the collection's half-hour. The ponderous wheeze of what sounds like a harmonium dominates “Départ” while multi-layered acoustic guitar playing and dancing marimba sprinkles follow in “Paris” and “Bordeaux,” respectively. Elsewhere, a squadron of out-of-tune pianos dukes it out in “Angers” while fuzzy tones in the closer “Autres directions” mirror the disc's opening. The mini-album's singular triumph is “De nantes à Pornic,” twelve minutes of bright strums, swirls, and plucks that mass into cascading clusters of heavenly sound; though it's difficult to tell whether the sounds are generated by harps or guitars, the entrancing piece nonetheless sounds marvelous.

October 2005