Faran Ensemble

Programming / music

This is the music of my country.
Well, it’s not really my country – it is the country of my first memories.

You don’t really know my country, I think, do you?
It’s a hard country to live in, where life is necessarily precious.
It’s a country of rocks, of sand, of little black sticks that flee at your approach.
Fortunately, they flee.
There are thorns, fat plants, skinny goats, dust, dust that flies constantly, sand, sand, red sand so fine that it passes under the closed windows and is deposited in the morning in your bedroom.

The overwhelming majority of my country is called Sahara.
You enter it by starting with a desert of stones, as far as the eye can see there are big and sharp stones, under which scorpions sleep.
And then comes the real desert, the one of the dunes.

There is so much noise in the desert – with each step in the sand, it is as if you have set the sea in motion, and it resonates in the infinity of the dunes. And with each step, you tear your leg from the grip of the sand. And with each step, everything resonates and crackles against your skin. There is the deep thud of your blood beating on your temples. And the incessant, short, muffled sound of breathing too hot air.
The desert is not the world of silence.

And we advance, we advance, trying to find the shadow of the dunes, the shadow of the beasts, the shadow of the biggest, we advance without really looking, and when we look, there are dunes, still, immense dunes, vertiginous dunes, strangely drawn dunes, the drawings of the dunes are created by the winds
Sometimes, miraculously, you feel something hard under your foot – then digging, you can find a sand rose and it is the prettiest thing I have found in my life.

And when the oasis arrives, there, so far away, you don’t know if you still believe in it, you don’t know if you want it, you are just completely stunned by the heat, these stones reduced to powder, this solitude – it is the solitude that I learned in the desert – not the silence.
What is the use of talking, of telling others that things are not going well? It’s not okay for anyone, after too much desert. So we move on, stupidly we move on.
The first time I arrived in an oasis, I didn’t even understand that I had arrived and that this strange ordeal was over, so difficult and so beautiful at the same time.
There was a little water coming out of the red earth, a bamboo bush – well I don’t know, it was green, big and soft, date palms and children dragging dates in the water on the ground. They threw themselves on my hair – I was very blonde. They thought it was gold. I was afraid.

In the evening, for the first time, I heard music like that played by the Faran Ensemble.
And that music was quite strange – I felt like the desert was making sense to me, that it finally meant something.
Not with words – words are not always enough.

There is in this music the immense time of the desert, there is the incessant rustling of the sand, this solitude, this plunge in the body which makes so many sounds that we forget so much to hear – these notes, it was this life which flowed as it could in this world of the stone, of the heat, of asphyxia.

This is the music of my country.

It seemed to me that in order to understand these musicians, who render the grandeur of the desert so well, it was necessary, at least a little, to say what we feel when we walk there.

These three men, who found each other to create this band full of soul, carry with them all the sand, all the warmth, all the wisdom that we learn there, in the land of sand.

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Featured Image : sand roses