Unspoken

The following text was written especially for the forthcoming album recording: Unspoken by the Katia Labèque Band. It's author, Alessandro Baricco, is globally known for his highly acclaimed novels which include: Silk, City and Ocean Sea.

When I first started listening to the Katia Labeque Band, the thing that fascinated me was trying to understand where that music came from. As for those three, I knew more or less where they came from, but that wasnt much help. Their artistic biographies dont tell the whole story about the freedom they have obviously cultivated inside: both the pleasure of discovery and an instinctive feel for creative subversion. Above all, this is music that tends to cover its own tracks, making it hard to work your way back to the source, to some clearly identifiable point of departure. In short, an enigma. Every so often, some patch of jazz, or an echo of Schumann, would give me a breathing space, enabling me to make a temporary identification that would then promptly vanish into the acoustic landscape that followed. It was a stubborn enigma, which mocked my capacity to understand and left me suspended in an enchantment without a name.

Then I stopped wondering where it came from and, enthralled, I began to look at where it was going. In a sense, a very physical one, I began to watch it move, to observe the way it spontaneously developed, to listen to its strange way of becoming. Not a lot of music becomes this way: apparently anarchic, aimless, free to the point of blindness, always unpredictable. If this music has a path to follow, it is the path of its own freedom, and none other. You cant even say that in the end it attains anything, and this, in an age when artistic creations are only means for the attainment of ends, struck me as almost a gesture of rebellion perhaps that very gesture of rebellion for which a long time ago they coined the term: poetry. Apart from the pleasure of listening for me particularly bound up with the slower pieces, less cluttered in terms of rhythm and timbre I still react to this music with the satisfaction you feel when you find yourself in the presence of a lesson. I have learned to remember that the things we invent have a right to infinity and not merely a duty to matters like form and a certain rationality. It is a lesson that I accept with gratitude and, as far as I can, one that I will stubbornly defend.

Alessandro Baricco, July 2003
(Translated by Alastair McEwen)

CLASSIC FM MAGAZINE
This is mood music of an extremely sophisticated sort…an indelible fusion of free jazz, Latin American, modern country, and minimalist procedures, projected via exultant melodic arches and rhythmic twists that impart a compelling sense of direction to the various tracks. Mesmerising stuff.

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
‘… moody avant-fusion. The compositions by Dave Maric, are extremely sophisticated and high effective on their own terms.’

TIME OUT
‘…a curious, intriguing piece of electro-acoustic music. Scraps of minimalist laptop, shrouded in synth textures…Labèque’s crisp piano tone sounds magnificent throughout.’

THE INDEPENDANT
‘The classical pianist turned jazzer has added electronic and African sounds to the mix and created something highly lyrical.’

THE INDEPENDENT INFORMATION
'Superbly Original'

THE GUARDIAN
'breathless sections of wild piano, virtuoso synth bass and hustling drum kit, peppered with spontaneously triggered synth sounds and samples... stylish.'

THE TIMES
‘the music, mostly by Maric, is full of interesting textural contrasts and sudden shifts in dynamics or mood. The results veer giddily between elegant classical stylings, outbreaks of nu-jazz...an entertainingly cutting-edge jazz unit.’

THE INDEPENDANT ON SUNDAY
‘The pianist attaches her rippling fluency to drums and electronics. Stimulating.’

VENUE
‘The results are wonderful, if amazingly difficult to compartmentalize – a genuinely fresh music. There’s a consistent beauty in the pieces… it is the sincerity of their collaboration that makes the Katia Labeque Band a truly mature new achievement.’

CD BABY
'Breathtaking from note one...Purely imaginative through and through...Truly a masterpiece in atmospheric, programmatic, and epic sound landscape.'