Tabustar

Taking its title from Pascal Quignard’s The Hatred of Music, Tabustar begins with an unstable word. A sound suspended between quarrelling and drumming, between human noise and resonant bodies. The title itself behaves like the music it names: resistant to fixed meaning, driven instead by rhythm, resonance and the physical act of sounding.

The record unfolds through insistent rhythmic structures, interlocking instrumental layers and a constant sense of propulsion. Rather than relying on melodic development, the music advances through pulse, repetition and subtle displacement. Patterns emerge, dissolve and return, generating a restless equilibrium between precision and instability.

Quignard remains present less as a literary reference than as an underlying impulse. Rhythm precedes language, organising movement, memory and listening before it settles into meaning. This shared intuition shapes the work without ever becoming a programme to be illustrated.

Across the duration of the LP, these shifting rhythmic relationships gradually reveal their complexity. Listening becomes an experience of continual reorientation, as recurring figures acquire new meanings through repetition, interruption and return.

“Tarabust is an unstable word. Two distinct worlds meet in it, attract it, and thus divide it according to two processes of morphological derivation that are both too plausible for the philologist to decide between them. The word tarabust is itself disputed between the group of that which belabors and the group of that which drums. Between the rabasta group (the noise of quarreling, the belaboring group) and the tabustar group (hitting, talabussare, tamburare, the family of resonators, of drums). Either vociferous human coitus. Or percussions of hollow objects. Acoustic obsession is unable to distinguish in what it hears between what it ceaselessly wants to hear and what it cannot have heard. An incomprehensible noise that belabors. A noise that could either be quarreling or drumming, panting or blows. It was very rhythmic. We come from this noise. It is our seed.

Pascal Quignard, The hatred of music, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, p. 39