Christine Ott – Chimères (Pour Ondes Martenot)

Nahal

The Ondes Martenot is one of those instruments that’s absolutely lovely, but has struggled to find an identity for itself. It’s in the realm of early electronic instruments, and it’s consistently used for swoopy spacey things and occasionally in the work of Olivier Messiaen.

Meaning that it’s very difficult to place the Ondes Martenot — either it’s sitting in a mildly chintzy, slightly hokey spot of esoteric BBC radiophonic-type stuff or it’s being compared to one of the twentieth century’s most peculiar, and gorgeous, composers. Occasionally it’ll find a spot adding colour to a piece — step forward Johnny Greenwood — but there’s a whacking great gap in the market for someone to write for the instrument as much as its ethereal sonority.

Hopefully that qualifies this — Christine Ott has done an outstanding job of using the instrument to its strengths. These are actual compositions. Well thought out, carefully structured, dramatic and cautious, contracting and expanding with intensities… there’s a lingering waft of sadness and a real gift for adding just enough density to make your heart stop. While a lot of this registers as “slow” music, it’s by no means sedantry. Perhaps more sentinel, with malevolent drift

So far as technique goes, I’ve no idea what’s going on here. I can recognise the characteristic Ondes Martenot sounds — the wild vibrato, the sudden glissandi — but there’s more than a few repeating figures that could well be a loop pedal or something built into the Martenot. Perhaps most critically, it barely feels important — there’s a specific, unhurried and undulating soundworld created that has a quality (strangely enough) something like Messiaen — in its own world, somehow of the future and of the past. That’s unfair of me and potentially lazy (in that the only real similarity is the instrument), but I mean to say that Ott has developed a symbiosis with the instrument, allowing it to create a world of careful textures. “Todeslied” has some particularly impressive textures whirling around, from fractured static sounds to intensifying triads of circus sounds and unearthly vibratos.

More on the subject of “this is well composed”: there’s a lightness of touch, a range of moods here that plays out carefully; “Mariposas” operates as a light interlude for the middle of the record, opener “Comma” is expansive and languid, “Pulsar”‘s staccato looping sounding like a synth convention with erratic powercuts. “Pulsars” is also notable insofar as it’s using mostly clipped notes; while the Ondes Martenot is great for elegiac dreamy drift, it’s also capable of expressing anguish and anxiety most effectively.

By the close of the record (“Burning”), we’ve been treated to a real tour de force of the capabilities of the Ondes Martenot, bubbling and epiphanic and gorgeous and expressive and, well, there needs to be more Ondes Martenot records; and if they were all by Christine Ott, I’d be more than happy.

-Kev Nickells-