Avanti!

It is no secret that one of the most striking features of Miriodor’s music is the way in which it blends fragments of vastly contrasting moods, harmonies, meter and rhythms. Few authors, however, have tried to describe the complex interplay of stylistic references that characterizes their approach. When it is listened to from that perspective, Miriodor’s music seems to proceed not so much from notes and beats as it does from styles, references and ideas.

Bewitchment starts off the album in a dark, gloomy mood characterized by the superposition of an almost Black Sabbath-ish distorted bass line doubled by a guitar over which Pascal Globensky’s synthesizers add a nice, gentle, post-apocalyptical feeling. The first break appears at 2:10, with the appearance of a mechanical, quasi-industrial rhythm generated by a beat box of the type Kraftwerk might have been using early in their career. It seems rather strange that over such a machine-like texture, Nicolas Masino would play some kind of moody Wurlitzer piano that makes one think of Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter, over a bass line reminiscent of Chunga’s Revenge by Frank Zappa. Perhaps inspired by all these moods from the 70s, Bernard Falaise states a theme at 3:15 that could be described as David Gilmour-esque, before breaking at 3:54 in an acoustical, almost folky interlude that will be violently interrupted at 4:42 by the return of the first theme.

The song’s next section, at 5:03, is a kind of silly dance built upon funky grooves and angular melodies, which reminds this author of an old and vastly underrated band from Québec named Sloche. An extended coda in a more subdued mood starts at 6:44. Notice how its steady, quarter-note rimshot pulse pulls in and out of sync with the melody and bass lines, which use odd meters. At 6:59 the bass line changes but the melody stays the same, an effective device that will be used on a couple of occasions throughout the album. The song ends in a sparse and whimsical way with a keyboard solo (7:43) and re-statement of the closing theme (8:38).

Over nine minutes long, Bewitchment seems representative of Miriodor’s latest approach to musical composition, which features longer pieces than on previous albums, and divides each work into various recurring (thematic) or non-recurring (episodic) sections. In that sense, each composition becomes a sort of symphony in miniature, based on the alternance of slow and faster sections, regular and irregular meters, «spacey» and «hard rocking» textures, and so forth. Quite curiously, the way in which the music often shifts to very contrasting moods, keys and rhythms, may remind the listener of Schumann’s extended piano pieces, which tend to proceed in a comparable manner.

Thomas the Impostor
Musicologist of Serious and Silly Stuff