Fabien Lévy — De l'art d'induire en erreur

Fabien Lévy is a French composer whose work sits between urgent modern composition and angular avant-jazz. Here’s a  CD bringing together five of his pieces from between the 1990s and early 2020s.

The release appears on Austria's Kairos Music. It’s presented in the label's house style digipak, with a stuck-on glossy inlay booklet- featuring colour photos, and texts in both English & German- taking in bios of the composer, players, as well as write-ups about each track.

The Paris-born composer has created work since the mid-1990s- in the past, his work has featured on four or so modern classical compilations/ collections. And seemingly De l'art d'induire en erreur( On The Art Of Misleading) is his first album.

The album moves from the taut interlocking honks, stretching swoons, warbling wavers, and tense percussive flirts ‘n’ pipes of "Durch, in memoriam G. Grisey"- a 1998 work for saxophone quartet. Onto the pressing tone simmer, bass swoon, and sea-sawing pluck & angular jig of  "Danse Polyptote"- a 2013 piece for accordion and cello.

The CD plays out with 1996’s “Les deux ampoules d'un sablier peu a peu se comprennent”- which is purely for harp, though at points the tone/ sound of the instrument almost sounds piano-like. The piece is built around a tense weave of plucks, scuttles, doomy twangs, and string reverberations.

De l'art d'induire en erreur is certainly a decent opening release from Mr Lévy. It shows him as a composer who is interested in both taut to seesawing tone, and creative ways of playing/ presenting instrumentation.