France chamber collective Snowdrops return to Injazero Records for their third album Missing Island, a musical fresco in seven pieces, a naturalist painting that exists between contemporary classical, post-folk and electro-acoustic music.
Missing Island is the sequel to the highly acclaimed Volutes (2020), and again sees multi-instrumentalists Christine Ott and Mathieu Gabry joined by violist Anne-Irène Kempf on most tracks. This new chapter in the natural history of Snowdrops is lent an earthier texture by the hand-pumped organ, performed by Christine Ott, when she’s not playing ondes Martenot.
The opening of the album ‘Retour à la terre’ could, explain Snowdrops, borrow these few verses from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity”
This new chapter in the natural history of Snowdrops is lent an earthier texture by the hand-pumped organ, performed by Christine Ott like in this opening track. First single ‘Firebirds’ unfolds like a fiery dance for piano, strings and ondes Martenot, on which Ott lets her inimitable technique speak in a series of lyrical glissandos from the lowest to the highest register. This evocation of the four elements continues with ‘Land of Waves’, music for the great outdoors, on which Mathieu Gabry simultaneously plays piano and analog synthesizer.
The album’s second half offers a deeper and metaphysical turn. ‘Nostalgia de la luz’ is clearly inspired by the documentary of the same name, directed by Patricio Guzmán; in the movie, astronomers from all over the world gather in the Atacama Desert to observe the stars. It is also a place where the dryness of the soil keeps human remains intact: those of mummies, explorers, but also the bones of political prisoners of the past dictatorship. While astronomers scan the galaxies in search of probable extraterrestrial life, at the foot of the observatories, women move the stones in search of their missing relatives.
In their own way the last three pieces each reduce this verticality, this connection between the infinitely small and the infinitely large, the past and the present, the human and the environment. Missing Island is also a story of Paradise and Paradise lost, a recurring theme in Christine Ott’s discography (TABU, Time to Die…). At the end, the trio produces a rainbow of feelings that could equally evoke Hania Rani, Warren Ellis and Esmerine, but in a personal breathe that is unique to Snowdrops.