I clicked play on the link to ‘Cézanne’, the new release from Copenhagen-based, cellist, singer and composer Cæcilie Trier a.k.a CTM, and the first word that entered my head was “WOW!” The lead track from Trier’s new solo project, Suite for a Young Girl, ‘Cézanne’ is one very dark alley, down which you don’t want to find yourself meandering alone late at night. It is music noir, ‘la musique très sombre’ and experimental music gone over to the dark side.
‘Cézanne’ is practically indescribable on the one hand, yet on the other, when you excavate down through it’s many layers, you find some wonderful gems just waiting to be mined. In its darkest recesses you will find diamond-bright spacious piano sequences, ebony-dark synth simulating a heaving, heavy breathing Middle-earth (think ‘Mordor’ the Musical), and intermittent notions of mercurial strings like flashes of granite sparkling from the shadows. Muffled, modulated vocals and inky dark samples wail and mumble over a ghostly chorus, spookily narrating this bleak, mysterious storyline.
“I thought of my making of Suite for a Young Girl as making a movie, or a storyline for a movie. Some short scenes, some long, different scenographies or interiors, landscapes to look at and to drive through, the different textures of the midi and the sculptural acoustic classical instruments,” says Trier. “Then in the center there is the narrator who leads you through the whole thing. I imagined myself to be this character, writing the lyrics not with song structures, just horizontal writing and composing, that was important.”
‘Cézanne’ is like Beauty and the Beast. It is deliciously haunting, terrifyingly magnetic, capriciously experimental and wonderfully divergent. CTM’s Suite for a Young Girl is due for release as an 8-track mini-album on January 22nd. A vinyl version of the album will be limited to 500 copies and features two drawings created by renowned painter Alexander Tovborg – one on the record sleeve and one as a poster. It is available for pre-order now via Tambourhinoceros.
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Note* – This review originally featured on Ja Ja Ja Magazine on 2nd November, 2015.
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