
Eolya – Sál
All great artists are fated to, at one point or another, feel as if they’ve been hard done by fate and that they should have been born at a different time. Indeed, the perceived glory of the past is not something that belongs exclusively to artists. The Renaissance, essentially, involved adventurers, scholars, cooks and, especially, artists promising their patrons a way back to the classics.
What was understood by all of this was that people had lost their way and that civilisation was going down a dangerous path. It was also implied that the classics, more or less, had the answers to all problems and that it would take other great men possessing extraordinary vision to glance back, take what was important and bring it back.
Eolya is looking toward the classics and asking for answers to life’s biggest questions. The result is a meditative piece inspired by medieval folklore music but one that takes a turn toward more modern sounds by the time the track is over. The song develops around you like a magical chant. It’s all a mad gamble, of course. Eolya hopes that something special will happen and that the truth will emerge from the past. And, it’s only the ones who dare to have these kinds of dreams that are eventually rewarded.
Julien Filion – sahara
Pop music since the 1950s is pretty simple to understand. So are its distant relatives like rock or progressive rock. They have established fancy schools for this kind of learning, but make no mistake about it, it’s something that’s easy to grasp once you get to the right formulas. A lot of people find how those formulas work and establish a music career. That’s maybe why so much music sounds the same – it uses the same formulas.
Still, the more ambitious modern musicians are always looking for something subtle and transcendent. Yes, modern songs occasionally manage to do that. But it’s such a freak occurrence that nobody knows exactly how you reach those special places. Nobody knows what formula you actually use to get there. All that everyone knows is that you have to go out on a search to find it.
Julien Filion is on one of these journeys and is using what would typically be called “jazz” by the initiative to get there. But that’s just a simple excuse. What the musician is really doing on “sahara” is painting with sounds dipped in nighttime dreams. This isn’t about technique or complex arrangements. It’s a piece of music that transcends all of that, a piece of music that should be heard by all music fans. It’s the sublime sound that alt-rockers are searching for all the time.