Nicolas Repao - Swing Swing [CD]

He has a reputation as a musician of a talented Jack-of-all-Trades as much at ease playing the guitar alongside his old accomplice, French songwriter Arthur H, as he is when tinkering with all kinds of machines by instinct, and creating made-to-measure contexts for instrumentalists like Michel Portal. <p> Everyone knew he had a secret garden, the "song" world of a composer and performer who was difficult to categorize, a world not only lyrical but also dark and full of tender melancholy, not to mention easily surrealist (his first record of songs, "La vile", which was released on the Indigo label in 1997, has a sequel in preparation in the form of a new opus, "Lovni".) But, once again, Nicolas Repac had a surprise in store, because he has turned up where no-one was expecting him: Swing Swing is a record as magnificent as it is difficult to place, with electro ramblings around jazz (its subjects and virtues, its spirit and memory), wanderings that are playful, light, fluid in gesture and crammed with ideas, discoveries and intuition; they are at once naïve and instinctive (Repac is an erudite amateur, the Ferdinand Cheval of the already-established world of electronic music), and extremely elaborate in their crushed samples, hallucinatory, rhythmic whirls and sensual, dreamlike atmospheres. There is nothing solemn or sluggish in this evocation of love; it is, rather, an unique way (though you wouldn't think so to see him at work, with that special manner he has of "settling" himself in his times with an unstable balance) of questioning what they call swing - and of offering it, in all humility, a whole range of possible futures.