Gae Bolg
Requiem

Eric Roger fully embodies the deep spirit of the medieval Jester, a complex and ambiguous figure, revealing its lunar, nocturnal, and sinister side through a sparkling, diurnal, and solar mask. One of the most original exponents of the Neo-folk scene, the French musician, now an orphan of the phantom Church of Fand, arrives at his second solo work after the journey through the French novella Aucassin Et Nicolette.

Though in its historical manifestation the figure of the Jester has been mostly impersonated by smug clerics with double chins, learned pedants with the spirit of eternal children, it is Literature that has elevated this character, making it a symbol of quest, an interpreter of the boundary between the sensible world and the celestial one, a tightrope walker of the "If". Like an old vintage "fool", Eric Rogers turns his kindly gaze to the past, dotted with the numerous losses that have marked his life, and decides that it is time to pay tribute to the stars that have marked his sky. After all, as he himself admits, "even death is a thought like any other in which to seek refuge."

As the title suggests, 'Requiem' is a collection of pieces that revolve around human death, elegant and sumptuous in their progression, as the Gae Bolg have always accustomed us to; if anything in this instance the perspective changes, becoming more intimate and personal: mourning can be external as well as internal, but it is always the self that is the main architect of these presentations of pain, exquisitely lyrical and poetic. What distinguishes Eric Rogers from the rest of the scene, at least from its less sincere representatives, is that continuous balancing between the serious and the ironic, which allows the music to span these two poles without ever tiring the listener, sometimes shaken by choirs and trumpets, sometimes tickled by the histrionic and buffoonish voice of Our friend.

Also on a more strictly conceptual level, this alternation of tones creates a play of voids and solids worthy of the great medieval architectures: the Middle Ages is the moment when the exasperated search for Form becomes Content and Meaning by itself; thus the music of Gae Bolg builds imposing structures using winds, trumpets, and strings, while remembering that it is the emptiness of the nave that makes the church great: it is the solo chants that temper the atmosphere, the pauses after the accelerations that grace the whole.

Thus, we move from the three "Choral" (I, II, and III), developing in choirs and counter-choirs according to the typical structure of the Requiem, to more considered and melancholic pieces like "Agnus Dei" and "Hymne", then quickly passing to more experimental moments, like the beautiful "Totentanz", full of eighties reminiscences, "March Au Tombeau" with its harsh trumpets, and a track like "Dies Irae", classic yet unsettling in the overlapping of melodic lines.

The common thread of such a heterogeneous understanding of art is undoubtedly represented by Eric Roger's voice, very theatrical and set (for those who know it, similar to Garm’s in "La Masquerade Infernale" of Arcturus, not by chance); if such a choice may alienate part of the listeners, it is nonetheless congenial to the lyrical-conceptual context it is tied to: is it perhaps by chance that some of the greatest tricksters of the past are closely tied to the world of the beyond? Thus the Dantean Ulysses throws himself into the abyss beyond the pillars of Hercules, thus Mephistopheles the tempter, with his goatee, thus the gravediggers' irony in Hamlet while burying the corpses. Literature is populated with these ambiguous figures, straddling the boundary between human and divine, ignorance and knowledge: it seems it is their prerogative to guard the door that separates these realities, as only they have that irony which is the key to not going mad in the journey between one world and the other. Kafka did not have it and thus never returned from that world of nightmares he immersed himself in, and so Munch, Strindberg, and Ibsen.

Eric Roger instead possesses these keys that allow him, misunderstood by most, to emerge from these abysses of death and transport them, veiling them with irony and sarcastic detachment on the notes of his own trumpet.

Cathartic.