Terre d'ombre, or umber is the name of an ochreous clay, a handsome dark brown, that was originally found in Umbria and, nowadays, in several other regions of Italy. Terra d'ombra is also the title of a work by Giuseppe Penone, a canvas covered with an imprint that one might say is skin, umber coloured with, at its centre, a few incrusted leaves, planted in the canvas itself. From Penones painting, l wanted to keep the concomitant notions of gesture and imprint as well as the highly visual image of wood and earth, materials often encountered in the artist's installations, from Albero (1970), Sentiero (1985), and Gesto vegetal (1983), up to Pelle di foglie (2000), Respirare l'ombra (1999), and Ripetere il bosco (1997).
Here, l sought a music that could blend in earthy sonorities, dry and dull, halting sounds represented by the blows to the instruments: struck on the body of the harp or on the cello's finger board, col legno battuto and deadened strings, notes prepared in the low register of the piano. Consequently - and that is a vein that I explore regularly -, the instrumentalists' gesture becomes a particular of the composition, which makes Terra d'Ombra a little choreography of movements that the instrumentalist must assume as such. In the hollow spaces of a rhythmic, gestural music, jerky and muffled, suspended, brushed spaces appear that are a place in themselves, like the reverse side of the mirror, and from which the song of the cello sometimes emerges, flautando - a voice in itself, to which a sort of modesty imposes lasting but a short instant, simple golden remains on a bed of thorns: Spoglia d'oro su spine d'acacia.
The four movements of Terra d'ombra (three duos and a trio) draw a cartography that is one possibility amongst others, passages amongst others between these so different worlds.

Jérôme Combier
translated by John Tyler Tuttle
Extract from CD booklet Gone, Aeon 2016

Recording

1 CD aeon, AE1651, Gone
Dawnlight, Noir gris, Dog Eat Dog, Terra d'ombra, Gone
Ensemble Cairn: Cédric Jullion (?utes), Ayumi Mori (clarinet), Caroline Cren (piano), Christelle Séry (guilar), AuréIie Saraf (harp), Naaman Sluchin, Saori Furukawa (violins), Cécile Brossard (viola), Frédéric Baldassare (cello)