Liner notes from the MAWJA CD “Studio One” (Al Maslakh Recordings – 2007)
This album struck me like a big wave, a wave that makes you lose your consciousness and equilibrium for several minutes, leaving you wondering what just happened to you during this elusive lapse of time. Probably this is exactly the purpose of this trio, where as their music draws rust from your very skin, suburban rust, from those big suburbs where the individual melts, and all individuality is melted by the heavy burden that eats all. The sound ate the self, ate the collective, ate time, and invaded space.
I wasn’t expecting such a radical treatment of sound. The music here goes out of time, depriving it of its value despite the usual ties that link time and music as an art form. What we hear is rather a strong binding with space, using it as a compositional tool. This music does not move, but it wanders like blocks of colours or shapes in the empty.
Raed Yassin - Beirut, March 2007
RUE 24
Jean Pallandre spent two weeks in Lebanon in July 2004 touring and capturing phonographies from the various soundscapes of the country (phonography is the sound equivalent of photography, as the capturing of sound elements through microphones put in relation with a specific sound environment). For Christine and Sharif Sehnaoui, who have been with Pallandre throughout these two weeks, improvising with these soundscapes is a very singular experience since they have both witnessed their genesis and enjoy a strong emotional bond to them.
The trio's music thus finds its originality in this raw material collected in another time and place, brought back to our ears at every concert in a collective free improvised gesture. No ethnological, touristic or documental intention here: rather a poetical interlude, a fleeting trip, an association of distance and proximity, mixture of presence and absence, ambiguity of relation to time and space. Divergent sensible and intimate experiences, shared in a space of common creation and common listening, at the crossroads between instrumental sound materials and field recordings.