Nahal Recordings is a staple of quality when it comes to contemporary experimental music. Whenever I get notifications or updates for any of their releases, whether from artists I’m familiar with or haven’t heard of prior, I always get that juvenile glimmer of glee in the corner of my eye. I’m sure you’re all, or most of you at least, aware of that phenomenon and its cause and effect. With the mentioned party in mind, you wouldn’t be wrong to assume your soul is about to be nurtured and caressed with something beautiful and haunting, whatever it may be.
Charbel Haber and Fadi Tabbal released their collaboration album Enfin La Nuit, originally composed as a soundtrack for an experimental film, via Nahal Recordings on June 2. While I’m deep at work in giving the album the proper review it deserves, today I’m glad to bring you the video premiere for the song “Chaque rose porte en elle une petite mort”, taken from the record. View the exuberant visual effort below.
Life comes, life goes. Through the twelve-minute runtime we can see slowly blooming and dying flowers as a time lapse, aptly referencing the song’s title, encasing the concept of how every rose carries within it a little bit of death, as do we all. Some analogies are more gripping than others, and the one found on “Chaque rose porte en elle une petite mort” hits particularly close to home with every single thing living and breathing. No matter how hard we strive for things, no matter how much we achieve, no matter who we are and who we meet along the way, it is all momentary and fleeting. Even though that sentiment carries plenty of melancholy and even distress in it, there is beauty of great magnitude embedded within it. We have to embrace our time here, by any means necessary, each of us in our own ways, and the meaning that subsumes into our lives is what makes everything worthwhile, one way or the other.
The introspection isn’t limited to what you can see from above, but also extends to what you’re hearing. Charbel Haber and Fadi Tabbal have together crafted an album of magnificent proportions, as Enfin La Nuit is easily the most heartfelt and moving piece of music I have heard in a long, long while. I won’t go into length as to why that is in the context of the whole album until later on (in my review), but “Chaque rose porte en elle une petite mort” does perfectly demonstrate what the four songs on the record all are about. Slowly evolving plain drones begin to amass textures around themselves as the haunting and graceful ambiance engulfs the listener fully. Instrumentally perhaps minimal but emotionally vast and striking, the song – together with its visual counterpart – creates a pure and sincere, transient moment that occupies its own space and time, separated from everything else going on in this world, as there is simply nothing capable of paralleling those minutes of holistic and ardent impermanence.
Charbel Haber and Fadi Tabbal released Enfin La Nuit at the beginning of this month, so you can do yourself a favour and dig into the entirety over here. I know I’m taking it for my umpteenth listen right now.
