CHROMOPHONIE 1: LE DIABLE ANGÉLIQUE

I've had to piece together this album using a combo of Spotify and YouTube to listen to all the tracks.

The title track is mainly a piano/violin piece, with a little guitar thrown in. Seffer's piano is the pace setter for Horvath on violin. Its relatively high paced, and the piano riff in particular gives the track a sort of 'duel' feel to it. Half way through it fades back a little, with Horvath plucking at the strings and Seffer playing softly but still keeping up the pace. This only last for a minute though as Horvath then goes into overdrive with some rapid and sometimes jarring work. This and the piano faces away, replaced by saxophone and guitar for the last couple of minutes. Its certainly interesting, but does feel like its missing something.

Os-Gyoker probably wouldn't be out of place on an early Magma album. It's quite a dirge which doesn't get out of first gear other than some occasional frenetic and distorted violin. This contrasts quickly with Bela bacsi emlekere, which although with plenty of jarring notes is relatively chirpy and upbeat to start with. Again, strong interplay between piano and violin as it goes back to the style of the first track. The remaining three tracks are much more about the piano, and to be honest, I got a bit bored as none of them really lead anywhere. Seffer is clearly talented but for me it just doesn't hold interest for long enough.

The angelic devil is confusing as for its inspiration, is it related to the origins of the composer as it is specified on some covers of the disc? It is a piece where confusion reigns and at the same time, there's durable but certain routing towards the end of the piece. After a short introduction with strings, we see this fast and oppressing piano. Towards the fifth minute, we sink even more in this madness with the appearance of the grating violin, harsh, sometimes bountiful. Then the saxophone makes its entry, in a calmer way, only the rhythm by piano remains worrying.

After that piece, we still have a dark reverie, calmer but the tone is still as oppressive, it is simply a superb piece of piano, I would like to make more nightmares like this one..

Bela bacsi emlekere is a fast and pleasant piece of about 3 minutes 30, the storm of the first 2 pieces seems to be over, and a little more joy comes out of this piece, but with a quite specific filter that makes the atmosphere heavier.

Griserie magyar carries well its name since it is melancholic, a net of a distressing piano with discordant notes passes, one cannot help thinking of one of the Caprices of Paganini so much the violin is in all its states.

Bunkos continues here in the melancholic register with a maudlin violin, everything accelerates and ends in apotheosis with some distorted piano notes. it is not my favorite though.

Mizwa closes the album with about 10 minutes of theme less interesting than the first track, it gets lost in all directions without having the same strength, the same "anguish capture" of the previous opuses. Only the finale seems to be really worth listening to.

So we have a quite homogeneous album, well in the vein of Zeuhl, although I am not an expert in the matter. This is my first album by Yochko Seffer, so I don't know the previous artistic works of the composer, but I can already say that I appreciate it a lot. I give a 3.5/5 to this album, I lack the hindsight to see the extent of the talent of the artist but the first try is rather successful.