Jean D. L. - Forays (2020)

Jean De Lacoste is simultaneously a musician and a video artist, but the approach he has to organized sounds and organized images seems reversed – his music, either when he plays the guitar or when he uses field recordings, is an imagetic and somewhat hazy soundscape, while is musically structured films try to provoque abstract emotions through the titillation of memories and fantasies. With a dreamy quality, seeming to suspend time, “Forays” is a journey to the inner self more than to the cosmos, and sometimes it gets noisy because there’s nothing in this record of the new age / neo-hippie myth that states the inside of our minds as the place where peace sleeps. Jean D.L. knows very well how to handle the two aspects – after all he had partnerships with Zbigniew Karkowski and Julia Kent, with one creating the most harsh sounds provided by electronic instruments, and with the other finding beauty in the volatile acoustic world. There’s subliminar agitations in these apparently quiet pieces, as in life itself when we wrongly think that a forest walk can clean our minds.