Home

First, there is this black-and-white photograph. That of a summer sky and its clear light overlooking a garden. But, as is often the case with Ô Lake, the simplicity of images and notes is only apparent: the shot is taken from a chiaroscuro interior, and the scene is filtered through a misted window. Like an echo of the nine pieces on this new album, which themselves are also just a few meters away from summer.

Here, the composer undoubtedly offers his most touching work. As if all his past projects were converging toward this peak of emotion and purity. A piano and nothing else, to express better than words the simultaneity of feelings, the in-betweens, melancholy and calm.

Yet this instrumental asceticism is never hermetic, and if the approach is radical, it is above all organic. From the opening Prelude, one is immediately struck by the sound of the hammer felts, the wood, the noise of the pedals; a production choice, today almost a political one, that favors the human, life, and its accidents.

Ô Lake speaks into the ear of ghosts (unless it is the other way around) and, with Home, offers a celebration of the invisible, the unsayable, and the “less is more” philosophy. But although stripped bare, these themes retain hope and almost always end up looking toward the azure, toward that Midsommar literally the middle of summer waiting just beside them. Behind the misted window.