Loading home…
Pascal Humbert is Lilium. Pascal Humbert is also the bass-player in 16 Horsepower. "Transmissions..." is the first Lilium album and a collection of songs and ideas that originated in 1984 and started to take shape and become reality over the next 15 years. "Transmissions..." is an instrumental album and like all good albums without singers the songs create little movies in the listeners head. A lot of the songs are inspired by the Mojave desert, where Pascal lived in the mid-90s and where he decided to put his songs together for an album. Thus the music is somewhat akin of Calexico, it has the same sun-baked feeling, a certain lazyness, but also a melancholic edge. Pascal plays "real" instruments throughout, there are no electronics used, the warm ambience is created by Bass, Drums, Guitar, Cello, Organ, Clarinets etc. "Transmissions..." is a beautiful musical trip and probably your best companion for a night drive. "Lilium is the nom-de-disque of Pascal Humbert, a guitarist best known, if at all, for his work with alt.country outfit 16 Horsepower, or his collaboration with PJ Harvey sidemen Rob Ellis and John Parish as Spleen. Culled from solo pieces recorded between 1984 and 2000, Transmission Of All The Good-Byes makes a mockery of the notion of musical fashion: it's quite impossible to tell which tracks date from which era, so congruent are their diverse forms. The titles are in some cases bluntly descriptive: the ambient drones of "Swell" loom and recede accordingly, and the guitar harmonics and bowed-strings of "The Film Box" are accompanied by the whirring of a film projector. "Four Basses", meanwhile, is exactly that, the interweaving parts layered in the methodical manner of Tubular Bells (albeit restricted to a more agreeable minute and a half). Others are less prosaic. "Loveless Road" is a delightful union of guitar arpeggios and wistful contrails of melodica driven along by a lazily martial snare, while the gorgeous "Sleeping Inside" employs yawning bowed bass and mournful clarinet to shade a multi-tracked guitar instrumental with a melody reminiscent of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat". Performed entirely by Humbert, save for three drum parts, one clarinet and one vocal, the album makes an evocative addition to the south-western sadcore-soundtrack genre. Particularly recommended to fans of Calexico and Rainer.