Track By Track: Franz Kirmann – Heures Indues

This new work marks a conscious return to the analogue warmth and textured modular synths of earlier compositions.

Blooming out of edits of live improvisations, each one remembers those endless, lazy afternoons in 80’s Senegal where Kirmann grew. They feel more like dreams than actual events, blurred by the distance of time and longing.

With all that in mind we thought we should have him break down each track…by track.

1 – En trois Parties

If this was a colour, it would be grey. A dusty grey. It’s a summer day in the Senegal of my youth but the sky is misty and there is dust in the air from the desert. Maybe it’s been raining… I don’t remember how this piece came together. I spent quite a long time editing it though to make it work, but I have no recollection of recording it.

The pieces on that album come from different recording sessions started during Covid until 2022/2023. I used to do a lot of music then and recorded everything. I would then listen again once time had passed and start editing and joining things, see what works etc. That album more than ever, feels like a painting I had in the corner of a room that I would keep revisiting now and then.

2. Le rêve de Marie

This is blue / yellow, saturated, zenith, laziness, dreaminess. Marie is a character in a Patrick Modiano novel set in an unidentified town South of Spain or North of Africa and the characters are paralysed by the heat. That’s the feeling I was trying to convey here. The music here also reminds me a bit of the soundtrack to “Riddle of the Sphinx” by Mike Ratledge, a 70’s experimental film.

3. Premiere Confidence

There are two pieces like this on the album, one on each side. Both are made from a main loop processed in some way and some field recording. This is a dark green. The jungle, the smell after the rain.
The whole album is a summer album anyway. But a damp, sweaty, summer the air is heavy, the atmosphere is still. A reference for me is the Pan American album “Quiet City”, a strong influence on the mood of Heures Indues.

Vous vous êtes allongée…

Près de toi.

I’m putting those two together because one is sort of an intro to the other. I stole the title from a Julio Cortazar short story about a mother on holidays with her teenage son by the sea. She realised that she is losing her little boy who is now becoming a man, falling in love for the first time and becoming more private, not sharing as much with his mother. The music here reminded me of the atmosphere of the novel .There’s some field recordings that I did in Dakar ten years ago. This is the beach, yellow, blue, you are dosing away, sound of the waves, sound of the people muffled in the wind and far away a construction site.

4. Extrait du dialogue

I struggled to find the right place on the album for that piece. For a while it was at the end but it didn’t quite work. It seems strange today to worry so much about track listing when everything is playlisted. It’s a dialogue between two synthesisers.
This is dark blue, night time. It’s one of the highlights of the album for me. I had this kicking around for years. A one take recording that didn’t accept anything I tried to add to it. It’s pretty much how it was recorded and performed.

5. Parcelles Assainies

The name is taken from a neighbourhood in Dakar near where I lived. It’s similar to “Près de toi” in mood.
You are driving across the town, end of afternoon, you feel blue, not too sure why, the sky is a heavy grey. Still that rainy season of the summer. This is born from a performance I did in my studio that was quite long and had to edit down quite a lot.

6. Fréquence Fantômes

This is luminous, sunny, hot. This is all made from a very long improvisation that I edited. The piece is using various mixed radio signals and recordings of various objects. There is a mangled piano sample in there too. In the Modiano book I mentioned earlier the main protagonist works for a radio that broadcast old missing person notices in the middle of the night, he imagines far away radios receiving a muffled signal of these broadcasts, cryptic voices in the night. This is how that piece feels to me. Different temporalities colliding. There is my son in there as well speaking when he was a baby. I like to put bits of my life in the music I make.

7. Deuxième Confidence

This is an echo of the first confidence on the A side.
It’s a short loop of a piano improvisation I did.
The summer has gone now. Brown. Autumn.

8. Constructions Nocturnes

Blue. Night. A Crane. This is like an Antonioni movie, the character is walking through construction sites, half built buildings, there are many of those in Dakar. Funding has run out so they leave them half finished. There is something of an unpleasant dream about that piece.

9. Fin D’un Jeu

The sun is rising, there is hope. This used to be called “Untitled Piano” but there is no piano. The title is from another Cortazar story.

You can purchase Franz’s Heures Indues on cassette (we persuade you towards this option, have a look at the lovely package above) or the digital album via Courier here