Wapassou
Messe en ré mineur

Sometimes the impulse to write about something in particular arises from the most unexpected things.

In this case, it comes from far away.

Some may remember Tina Aumont. Not many, maybe. But some do. I imagine it, or at least I hope so.

Everyone has their own actresses, among the many known through a screen. Well, Tina Aumont was and remains one of mine. Perhaps the one for me, if I had to name just one. I don’t mean the greatest, or anything like that. I mean the most alluring, the most sensual, the most magnetic. And not to be special or to mention a less well-known name for the sake of it.

One not many will remember, yes. She often played secondary roles. But one who had... you know, that indefinable je ne sais quoi that made her different. Irresistible. Tinto Brass, who directed her in the strange and highly-censored The Howl, defined her as: "probably the most beautiful I have ever dealt with".

And yet, even the Supreme Connoisseur couldn't find the appropriate words. It wasn't simple beauty that could justify such a definition. It was something else. But inexpressible in words.

Now: it happens that not long ago I found a video online about Tina Aumont in Satyricon. Not Fellini's, but Gian Luigi Polidoro's. The one with Tognazzi as Trimalchio. Tina was Circe in that film. I remembered it well. But in the background started a music that wasn't the original from the film - but another, which also sounded even more familiar to me. It was Wapassou, and they were sounds - I can't explain how, but that's how it was - that entered into a seductive resonance with those scenes. Strange but successful combination.

"Wapassou... who were they...?"

And for that strange reason, the present album came back to my mind, listened to years earlier during a period of infatuation with the "sacred profaned". A period when there was a recurring temptation to indulge in more than one electric Mass a week, and not just on Sunday: the one in F minor by the Electric Prunes (remember the Kyrie Eleison from Easy Rider...?); the Parisian-avant-garde one of the unthinkable collaboration Spooky Tooth/Pierre Henry...

...and indeed: the Mass in D minor by Wapassou. 1976. The start of a trilogy that would be completed with the subsequent Salammbo and Ludwig: un roi pour l'éternité. Trilogy on life, death, and, indeed, eternal time.

They were from Strasbourg. France, but Alsace. Therefore, Germany a stone's throw away. And you can feel it. Even though it’s not so simple to describe Wapassou’s music in two or three words. Someone said: "indefinable. Or perhaps, sounds of an austere beauty, for those who love to be transported". I wouldn't say transported. I would say: entangled. Bewitched. Hypnotized.

Needless to say, resolving everything with beautiful (cold) ready-made definitions like avant-prog and the like is tantamount to stripping certain sounds of their ungraspable infinite mystery. Let us remove a doubt anyway: compared to the homonymous Wapassou two years earlier, here there is really little to relate to Rock. Not "Rock" in the strict sense, but perhaps not even in a broad sense. The Mass even does without drums, and there are only three of them: Freddy Brua (The Mind who conceived it all) on keyboards and synths, Jacques Lichti on violin, and Karin Nickerl on guitars.

Plus the voice of a soprano: Eurydice. So faithful to her name that she seems to sing from the Underworld.

A single track in multiple movements, for almost 40 minutes. Very Oldfieldian, the idea. If it weren't for the pervasive sense of impatience with genres and categories that in the Franco-Germanic area had infected many. It is no coincidence that certain strange movements of the violin (try to insert yourself between the 13th and 15th minute) sound like ominous omens of something unusual. Something more akin to certain RIO from years to come rather than the symphonic Pop that such a liturgical context would have favored. And the austerity mentioned earlier is all in the complicated guitar-Farfisa and synth-violin constructions - comparable to the boldest Jean-Luc Ponty...? Yes, at the limit - if not for those vocalizations that overlap, subtly unsettling. And there will be a double surprise, catching Arabic-like passages about three-quarters of the way through the work.

But... the D minor of the title...? Simple inspiration for developments (FUGUES) galore. Yet, never unnecessarily virtuosic. Too varied to recount in words, too complex for a description to at least partly replace the sounds. Sounds so evocative, besides.

If Eno conceived music for airports, Wapassou conceived a music for abbeys. Severe, dark, arcane. But capable of daring, of experimenting. Of not stopping at the usual beautiful exhibition of sounds and instruments. Depicting worlds, leaving behind secret disturbances.

I will never love this Mass as much as my beloved and lamented Tina Aumont.

But both share that je ne sais quoi that words cannot reach.

That something.

Mystery.