Présent
This time, it really is the end...
The release in April 2024 of Roger Trigaux's final opus, entitled This Is Not The End with a touch of (Belgian, obviously) humour, could have been dominated by a feeling of sadness. Sadness that this ‘great inhuman adventure’ (the title given to the live album released in 2005 from the band's incredible American tour in 1998), which began in 1980, has come to an end, with no hope of a comeback this time. It is also, and above all, sad that the man who masterminded it was unable to see it through to completion, having died in March 2021 just a few months before his seventieth birthday and a year after the recording sessions had to be brought to an abrupt halt due to a certain health crisis...
But Roger Trigaux was not a man to wallow in solemnity and, despite a declining physical condition that had led him over the years - he had once been a virtuoso guitarist - to reduce his instrumental contribution to the group to a few synth layers and concentrate on writing, To the very end, he retained that vital drive which, behind a façade of apparent darkness (how can one take literally the title of his most famous composition, ‘Promenade Au Fond D'Un Canal’? ), imbued his music with a paradoxical luminosity.
There were, of course, a few moments of discouragement, but he was able to count on the support of faithful ‘fellow travellers’, first and foremost Michel Besset, the band's tour manager in the early days, who later became a concert and festival organiser, culminating in the Rock In Opposition in Carmaux (2007-2018), for which Trigaux was co-programmer for a time, and mastermind of the participatory funding that enabled this album to see the light of day, on the Cuneiform label, which has also been involved with Présent for nearly 40 years. It was Besset who, when the band had gone into dormancy without having recorded (or even finished rehearsing) their latest magnum opus, convinced them in 2018 to undertake this unfinished project. Présent returned to the studio, first in May 2019 for the final edition of Rock In Opposition organised in Bourgoin-Jallieu, Isère, then in March 2020 in Brussels for the studio sessions.
For a long time, Trigaux had been able to count on the presence of his son Réginald at his side to assist him, and eventually replace him, on guitar. When father and son fell out, a new face joined the Présent family, one familiar to regular RIO-goers: François Mignot, guitarist with Ni, PinioL and the Very Big Experimental Toubifri Orchestra. He completed a line-up that had remained stable since the late 90s: American drummer Dave Kerman, recruited in 1995 (and the album Live! album, which featured an early version of ‘Contre’), pianist Pierre Chevalier, brought in for the 1998 US tour, and bassist Keith Macksoud, another American, whose baptism of fire had come in public: a guest solo on the aforementioned ‘Promenade...’, immortalised on A Great Inhumane Adventure. The line-up was subsequently expanded to include saxophone, trumpet and cello, with Kurt Budé, from cousin band Univers Zéro, adding his clarinets in 2013, joined in 2015 by Aranis violinist Liesbeth Lambrecht (who went on to become a regular collaborator with Flairck and Isildurs Bane). To this instrumental line-up should be added sound engineer Udi Koomran, who has been fully involved with the band throughout this quarter-century.
This Is Not The End features the entire title suite, first known as ‘2013’ (the year a dozen minutes or so were played at the RIO as a medley with the second half of ‘Promenade...’), then ‘2018’ at Bourgoin-Jallieu, a version corresponding to ‘Part 1’ on the album, in a set that began with the new arrangement of ‘Contre’, keeping very little of it. ‘), then “2018” in Bourgoin-Jallieu, a version corresponding to “Part 1” on the album, in a set that began with the new arrangement of “Contre”, retaining little of the 1995 original apart from Trigaux's introductory recitative, taken from a 1934 poem by his compatriot Henri Michaux.
‘Contre’ is undoubtedly the most appropriate opening track, with its percussive riff-leitmotiv, a sort of RIO cousin of the one in ‘Satisfaction’, and its rock energy that only subsides for a short lull. The vindictive apostrophes of a Trigaux from beyond the grave are followed by an epic, madcap Hendrixian guitar solo from François Mignot, who makes an entirely convincing entry into the Présent family. Présent retains its chamber accents, notably through the supporting role of the violin, but it's in the very last minute that, in a sudden profusion of virtuoso riffs, a spectacular, flamboyant finale brings the album's first peak of intensity.
The title suite, which spans a total of almost 39 minutes, can be subdivided into not two but three main phases. The first half of ‘Part 1’, still in chamber music mode, with the bass clarinet playing a key role, begins by treading water, as if mired in darkness, but with that low double piano note anticipating the developments to come in the second half, where the full band finally delivers, particularly in the last 10 minutes, what will go down as one of the genre's peaks: superbly orchestrated chamber rock with a density of writing almost unrivalled in the Présent catalogue, served up by exceptional musicians. Particularly noteworthy are the question-and-answer games between violin and guitar, but the performance by the immovable Chevalier-Macksoud-Kerman trio is just as praiseworthy.
Finally, ‘Part 2’ offers 12 minutes that have never been played live before. It has to be said that here we leave the realm of rock for what might more appropriately be called electric chamber music (the piano even ends up giving way to the harpsichord), for want of the propulsive energy of the bass-drums duo. But that doesn't stop the tension (the bass clarinet, once again, is an essential ingredient here) or the intensity, and better still, without giving way to unbridled lyricism, the music becomes more luminous, and the last few minutes are among the most beautiful on the album, even when at the very end we return to a heavier atmosphere, punctuated by the very sonorous exhalations of a Trigaux visibly unwilling to breathe his last.
Over and above the satisfaction that this final opus could be produced before it was too late, This Is Not The End is above all the culmination of an extraordinary musical adventure - and not at all inhuman, for that matter -, which saw Roger Trigaux achieve a feat of which there are few equivalents: After a reactivation in several phases – let’s not overlook Certitudes (1998), the result of an inevitably short-lived quasi-reformation of the original line-up - Roger Trigaux created four albums of new music that equal, and may even surpass surpass, those on which his reputation was built. He achieved this by knowing how to surround himself with the best, but also and above all by succeeding in surpassing himself as a composer, as this final discographic milestone so eloquently proves." –
Aymeric Leroy
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