Child of the Sands

Sunako is the heroine of the film 港の日本娘 (Japanese Girls at the Harbor) directed by 清水 宏 (Hiroshi Shimizu) released in 1933. This trio was originally conceived as a cinema concert to accompany the film. But Simon Drappier, Steve Argüelles, and Csaba Palotaï decided not to leave it at that, and they chose this name, Sunako, which means “child of the sands”. This is a way of noting, perhaps, that this first album does not just come from nowhere.
It is criss-crossed by its share of phantoms, landscapes, invitations to the dance, and electric fog – sometimes as incisive as a knife. And among all the folklores invited as friends, here we will particularly hear echoes of desert blues, in the sound of the g roup or in the greeting from a cousin of the Carpathians to musicians from Niger (Aïr).
To make it, they use two guitars, one a baritone, which blend together so well that it seems a vast guitar-harp sweeping across the octaves. The drum kit catalyzes the fusion, and everything is cooked over a wood fire. We could say, if we like, that Sunako is a group of guitar music (and which of us would cast the first stone?) but it is also, quite definitely, a dancing beast with three heads. And this is the beast whose metamorphoses we are going to follow.
This is the seventh opus by Csaba Palotaï released by BMC, and the third that tells of his companionship with Steve Argüelles, after Antiquity in 2019 and Cabane Perchée in 2021. Since his venture as a soloist (The Deserter, 2016), the Hungarian guitarist has never ceased to  reinvent himself, while still retaining his Transylvanian touch and his stony lyricism. Steve Argüelles packs a punch, tribal and minimalist like a theatre of finger puppets and his 180° vision. His self-indulgence too: a doit-yourself omnichord, a vocoder, a few poems. And a new arrival on this label: Simon Drappier, who in parallel universes plays the arpeggione and the double bass, and who flits from one universe to another with the ease of Steve McQueen jumping onto a horse in mid-gall op, tossing into the pot a fistful of Ars Nova (Messe de Nostre Dame), a fistful of Californian surfing (Arsenal), and a fistful of Laura Palmer’s hair (Henriette).
This album was recorded live in Budapest, without headphones, without a mixing console, giving plenty of space for improvisation. The lion’s share of space. With a drastic choice at the cut: only keep the suspended moments, the ones where things are in the process of appearing (as Steve Argüelles names them out loud in Dalva, to marvel at it calmly) – or let’s say, to avoid misunderstandings, the moments where music is already corporeal, even though our worthy musicians, hard at work as they are, might not have realized it yet. Because this is about abandon. Vigilance too, but a good dose of abandon.
And exchange: to start from a riff or an idea, a sensation, or a new rule of the game put forward by one or the other, or the other; the musicians plunge into trance (because often, the first pretext is dance) and allow themselves to be guided by the collective impulse. No solo, no ego trip, no shows of strength. A no-power trio. Together, they discover the landscapes, they roam through them, are surprised by them, allowing motifs to be superimposed and jostle together, and to construct other landscapes… which they welcome again without preconceptions. The music follows its own path, with detours, changes, secret passages, and unexpected vistas. Anything that arises out of this is wel come: a Gothic cathedral, a river, a hare, a beguine.
This development by the superimposing of motifs or layers, borrowed from repetitive music and electro, is noticeable in The Trail, which follows the evolution by mitosis of a simple leitmotiv, or in Buckboard, where the score is like a huge basket of Lego bricks, where everyone draws loops, or cells, as they wish, according to the lie of the hand, and “Anything goes if it dances”.
But in its acoustic research, Sunako borrows as must from electro as from traditional music, from rock, or jazz, of course… and if you open the drawers, you’ll find even more echoes. Other phantoms, and other islands. From a beaming morning like a market day (Ave de Clichy, from the name of a working class quarter in Paris) opens the CD, until the unsettled ostinato (Ricera, a reference to the seventh movement of György Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata) that closes it. For these seasoned, unkempt musicians (they made a special effort for the photo), so joyously (priestlily?) eclectic, have returned from their journeys, beards full of butterflies¹.

Wladimir Anselme
Translated by Richard Robinson


_{¹ Image borrowed from Federico Garcia Lorca, in Ode à Walt Whitman}