Pastoral – L’échappée belle (CD + booklet) | Sonopoetics – Transonic Label

With the multiform project L’échappée belle (‘the great escape’) – an interdisciplinary collaboration begun in 2007, resumed in 2016 and completed in 2017 – Pastoral explore under a surreal, animist and poetic look, the imaginaries and living spaces of a provincial Wallonia (Belgium) tinted with strangeness and offbeat humour.

For this selection of 23 photographs (taken by Christophe Bailleau), with poetic fragments (written by Philippe Franck), taken from a more abundant material for a first exhibition at the Alliance Française Brussels-Europe in September 2017 (as part of the international sound arts festival City Sonic), Pastoral created -from improvisations reworked or left in their initial state- a dozen of soundtracks (in this CD) for these image-text diptychs (a booklet inserted in this sleeve) whose immediacy has also been preserved. These (non)scores of the instant can be also listened to an autonomous and random manner, depending on the mood.

An escape into the interstices of our ordinary/never ordinary everyday that is also an invitation to transcend the weight of appearances.

Numbered and limited edition of 350 copies