Jazz
Ghost Rhythms, a Paris nine-piece active since 2005, release “Missing Times” this Friday, 30 October. It’s their ninth album and their third for Cuneiform Records. The first track, “Quinta del Sordo”, is already streaming on the label’s Bandcamp page.
The album is built around the time lost by people who say they were abducted by a UFO and remember nothing of it. One of the twelve tracks is named after Betty and Barney Hill, the New Hampshire couple who said they had been abducted in 1961. “We’re trying to decolonize the UFO lore from the UFO in order to access the human part,” drummer and guitarist Xavier Gélard says in the label’s notes.
Gélard and Camille Petit, on piano and Rhodes, wrote and produced the music, most of it recorded live in the studio. The line-up adds guitar, flute, accordion, cello, bass, congas and alto and tenor saxophones, and there are guests: Bertrand Aimar on violins, Maxime Berton on soprano saxophone and a choir directed by Frédéric Garcia on six of the twelve tracks.
Cuneiform’s notes place them alongside The Claudia Quintet, The Bad Plus, National Health, Art Zoyd, Miriodor and Lars Hollmer. The album closes on its title track.
Text by Aina Torrents