On the occasion of the release of saturn 63Seb Martel is the guest of the #SessionLive to tell his crazy adventure among the guitars of collection at the Museum of Music in Paris.
An idea runs through the career and discography of Seb Martel, one of the most fascinating and yet unknown guitarists on the French scene. This idea is that an instrument can, and must, continually reinvent music, deploy new textures, bring new nuances. It was obvious in his solo albums: Ragalet in 2003, Coitry? in 2007. It was noticeable in his collective productions (Vercoquin, Olympic Gramofon, Las Ondas Marteles) or his experiences as a studio musician (for -M-, Alain Chamfort, Femi Kuti or Camille). It’s just as striking when listening to his new album, saturn 63, named in reference to the latest model of electric guitar discovered during a collaboration with the Musée de la Musique. This third long-format, openly focused on experimentation, is indeed the fruit of a long reflection, made possible thanks to a collaboration between the Philharmonie de Paris and InFiné: started with “InBach” by Arandel, that -this continues today through a disc entirely thought of the guitar, an instrument relatively little highlighted in the catalog of the French label.
For several months, Seb Martel thus had access to the sumptuous collection of electric guitars housed by the Musée de la Musique. There, left alone in these corridors filled to the brim with instruments of great rarity, and therefore precious, the Frenchman was able to draw on the sounds of other eras, other continents, emancipate himself from conventional forms, jump from one genre to another and associate with other six-string enthusiasts. This is how we find -M-, never the last to abandon the radio format and go towards less marked paths; Vincent Ségal, whose eclecticism and sense of sound exploration no longer needs to be proven; Mathieu Boogaerts, always torn between his taste for song and craftsmanship, but also Martin Gamet, spotted at Camille. The presence of his many guests should not make us forget Seb Martel’s beautiful and great ambition: to highlight the many guitars that populate the darkness of the museum’s basements, from the most prestigious exhibited in display cases to the most humble, passing by the worst off. Every sound, every rhythm, every texture of saturn 63 thus comes from these guitars, manipulated and triturated with the idea of widening perspectives, of turning their backs on the comfort of quickly identifiable melodies and of summoning all that he was able to play, listen to, learn, think and feel in thirty years of practices and projects of all kinds.
Remember that Seb Martel, born in 1975, was given his first guitar by his father. He was 17 years old and then discovered a passion, a perfectionism and perspectives, alternating between musical works and transversal projects (for theater or dance, in particular). Since then, what he seeks to demonstrate seems to be able to hold in three points. First of all, by a process as daring as it is admirable: that the practice of the guitar must be punctuated by contrasting and exploratory conceptions. “How to reinvent the melody? », question the fourteen compositions gathered on saturn 63.
The second point is that of freedom. He made it a line of life, a line of flight. Throughout these fifty minutes, the Frenchman happily switches from rock to industrial music, from the reinterpretation of Elvis Presley classics (“Blue Suede Shoes”) to pop pranks with the most beautiful effect (“My Best Friend”) , without for a second escaping the rigid framework of stylistic barriers. The last question posed saturn 63, it is that of filiation. Behind the search for new sounds, it is finally only a question of that: the heritage, all this legacy left by these guitars, steeped in history and yet devoid of any nostalgia when they are in the hands of a lover. of melody such as Seb Martel. “This album exists only thanks to the help of the teams of the Museum of Musicsays Alexandre Cazac, co-founder of InFiné. They were able to meet the conditions so that Seb Martel could come and discover and then try all the guitars in the museum, but also the numerous ones hidden deep in the reserves.In reality, everything happens as if these had never gathered dust, as if the singularity of their sound were put at the service of an even greater ambition, in stable balance between dissonances and instrumental richness, between delicacy and technical prowess, between minimalism and skilfully orchestrated melodies.
We must therefore be grateful to Seb Martel for having been able to maintain a coherent line between these multiple instruments and for having captured, if not the spirit, at least the atmosphere of these long and meticulous weeks of research without tending towards the ‘abstruse. saturn 63, it is a musical proposal, humble and yet courageous, researcher and yet accessible, but it is also and above all the work of an artist who has managed to shape a beautiful musicality, without pretension or snobbery. let’s think about Heavenly, a kind of minimalist lament carried by the murmurs of Martin Gamet and the spectral song of the talented Sabrina Bellaouel. let’s think about soul kiss, a melody full of contrasts, as refined as it is striking, silky as it is melancholic: each time, there is not a single note too many, only sidesteps, performed alongside prestigious performers (Cindy Pooch, Vic Moan, Camille), precisely there to harmonize the subject, to humanize intentions and ideas which, in others, would sound indigestible. You have to listen to songs like Balulow, That Yongë Child Or Blue Suede Shoes, much more distressing and indebted to the blues than the original version, to measure the poetry of Seb Martel’s compositions, never demonstrative, always expressive, perpetually serene. They are the work of a sensitive artist, in search of purity, whose saturn 63 comes to crystallize the musical know-how at the same time as the capacity to give birth to melodies of an extreme beauty, out of time and its ephemeral excitements.
The #SessionLive will be enhanced by interviews withAlexandre Girard-Muscagorrycurator at the Museum of Music, Mr Martel father, Vincent Segalcellist, performed by Elodie Maillot.
Titles performed at the Grand studio
– SeventyLive RFI
– Blue Suede Shoesfrom the album saturn 63
– My Best FriendLive RFI see the clip
-Trustsingle Sabrina Bellaouel
– Future Talkfrom the album Saturn 63.
Line Up: Seb Martelguitar, voice, Sabrina Bellaouelsong
Sound: Jérémie Besset And Benoit Letirant.
► Scrapbook saturn 63 (InFined 2022).
(Rebroadcast November 27, 2022).