Pieter Both by A Gethsémani

From September 1989 to the summer of 1991, I lived and worked in Mauritius as part of a cooperative military service. It was a really new life for me, far from everything I had known until then. Nothing was familiar to me, everything was to be discovered, far from the tourist postcards. I had taken my instruments with me, as well as a new recorder, a Tascam 8-track tape recorder, and I had been able to set up a small studio at home in Pereybère, in the north of the island. So I continued to record regularly, as I did in France.
Mauritius, where Indian, Creole and Chinese cultures coexist, was Ali Baba's cave for me. Curious about new sounds, I started playing Indian instruments I only knew from records, like tablas, sitar, santour and harmonium. Seeking to meet teachers, I befriended extraordinary musicians, including Mohunlall Takah and Clifford Laffleur, to whom I played my music and to whom I offered to add their instruments. Sessions were held with one or the other, often separately. That's how other musicians came to record with me on a more occasional basis, like Shanjjet Teeluck, a magnificent sitar player. Little by little, about thirty tracks were recorded, a music full of colours and contrasts, with a new acoustic dominance for me.
The A Gethsémani project, which for a few years had only existed as a duo with Isabelle Morival, opened up new horizons, while, on a personal level, Isabelle and I separated. Solitude Beau Miel Absent is thus the only song on the album, where you can hear her beautiful voice, and the last one in our history. The album does contain a lot of songs, though; taking the vacant position of singer, I was looking for melodies, using my voice, no longer as a sound source of any kind, but as a carrier of texts - essentially poems by Guillaume Apollinaire.

Back in France, Dominique Diebold from AYAA put me in touch with one of his friends, Jean-Maurice Rossel (Débile Menthol; Nimal), for the mixing of the album. In his Studio des Usines in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) Momo Rossel did an extraordinary job on these tapes recorded in a modest environment. The album was released in 1992; its title "Pieter Both" is a reference to an emblematic mountain of Mauritius, to whom the 28 tracks owe everything.
The cover was created by Denis Charrier, a graphic designer friend of mine, who had already worked on the magnificent cover of the Ottoman Violine cassette.
In December 1993, in Revue et Corrigée (n°18), Pierre Durr wrote: "Somewhat in the same playful and somewhat naïve vein as Look de Bouk or Klimperei, more acoustic, with the addition of traditional instruments (tabla, sitar) and texts borrowed from Apollinaire, Eluard and Bernardin de St Pierre. And a lot of tenderness... "

Bernard Odot, July 1, 2020

In 1986, I started to record alone, with a four-track cassette of melodic pieces with dark atmospheres.
The first thing I had to do was to choose a name, so my curiosity for religion and my aesthetic tastes led me to Gethsemane, a biblical name evoking both the threat and the appeasement that the night brings.

A Gethsémani ‎
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