Big Sun

Big Sun, Christophe Chassol’s brilliantly-dazzling third album, crowns his trilogy of ultrascores (a method he elaborated for harmonizing, symphonizing real life, the ‘here and now’), which started out in Creole speaking New Orleans (Nola Chérie, 2011) before pursuing its route through India (Indiamore, 2013). In March 2014, Christophe Chassol took off for Martinique, his family’s birthplace; these West Indies that epitomize everything he dreamt of expressing, from the purely personal to the perfectly panoptic. Hand-in-hand with the production sound mixer Marie France Barrier and the sound engineer Johann Levasseur, the trio filmed and recorded a myriad of extraordinary encounters, scenes of everyday life, the carnival… a highly-evocative documentary that was to become the matrix of Big Sun. Back in France, he composed, edited, rehearsed and created the 27 tracks of a 70- minute West Indian space odyssey. Big Sun is a weaveworld of birds’ songs and Pipo Gertrude’s whistling, Joby Bernabés poetry and a tête-à-tête with a lady mountain-dweller, Sissido and Samak’s rap, Mario Masse’s flute, the Fort de France carnival, conch shell echoes, the ocean’s music and the hullabaloo of a game of dominos. And sumptuous pieces of music like La Route de la Trace or Reich & Darwin, which suddenly spring up at a bend in the road and take our breath away.