I wish to highlight the depth and unfathomable solitude of a human being besotted with his freedom of writing and thinking. He has a personality that can’t leave a composer indifferent, especially a composer who writes jazz. It is here question of religion, meaning, nature. From this feast of passions, Sade creates a baroque theatre where the world’s brutality is uncompromisingly depicted. I have turned these fairytales for adults into songs: this musical format seems the most apt to translate the theatricality and the magnificent complexity of Sade’s works. I see these songs like the pearls of a necklace, firmly linked by a musical thread. This thread is like a swamp, at times disturbing and at times quiet, where these sound bubbles are born and where they die. One doesn’t make a Sadean necklace without risking a few knots, but the material is so powerful, it can shine as bright as this ‘dark sun of the age of Enlightenment’.
Jean-Rémy Guédon
One evening, at the edge of a wood…
Once upon a time, there was a marquis, whose legendary love affairs had forced to hide in the very deepest part of the woods. One rumour had it that he mated with animals as well as with humans. Another said that, appalled by the stupidity, the cowardice and the lies of our world, he had become the leader of a bloodthirsty gang of bandits and that they quite liked to eat vicar shank during their feasts. Some affirmed they had seen him howling at the moon with wolves. What was certain is that with every full moon, a lament would find its way through the trees and set light to the fearful ears of those who shuddered around the fire.
Accompanied by eight musicians, the marquis would sing, in a sabbath that would throw souls one on top of the other. That was what the rumour said! But who had made the effort of going into the woods? Who had listened carefully to the marquis’s songs?
Tonight, you’ll have to disobey your mother, who once told you: ‘never go to the woods on your own. One never knows what can happen in the woods.’ For it is to one such night of sabbath that we invite you.
Jean Lambert-wild
Euphoria of the shadows in the light
What illuminating freedom, full of pleasures and celebration, is born of the fusion of the marquis de Sade’s words with the notes that Jean-Rémy Guédon has composed!
In it, I find the same questions that inhabit the entirety of my thought process.
To quote the Marquis: ‘the sensations communicated by the organs of hearing are the most flattering and those impressions are the liveliest.’
A voice devoid of musical resources is dull. It struggles to wake up great passions and to create a vibration out of what is misunderstood.
The thorny question a voice’s motif on a theatre stage can only be overcome with the musicians’ harmonious concord.
There, there is a way of combining the power of meaning with the infinity of sounds, and thus to conjure up the absence of reason where our civilisation is taking us.
Jean-Rémy Guédon invites me to join this beautiful design, and I would like to offer it all the vibrations of a space where our impressions will forever be able to euphorically go from shade to light.