A phrase that keeps coming back to me in one of life’s rare quieter moments is “not knowing is most intimate”. It’s a Zen Koan, or so my partner tells me after spending a bit too much time on meditation apps of late. The phrase is traditionally repeated to oneself to bring ordinary daily occurrences to a deeper and more mysterious level. The point is not to think about the words, to figure out what it means. The point is to keep chewing on it until it suddenly or gradually reveals itself to us. Working in this way, we go beyond our usual understanding of things.
To know something is also a process of acquisition. You’re taking something from the external world via exposure to repeated stimuli, absorbing and secreting it by whichever mode you choose. To know is to also be aware of something through observation, inquiry, or information – all three of these human processes are contingent on the passage of time. Though this may be a philosophically lofty entrance to an album review, music is one of the ways we decorate time. With time being our most precious currency, as economic trends and information landfills hijack our waking moments, we have very little of it on our own terms.
So much of the modern world demands our full attention. In a rapidly evolving landscape marked by fleeting trends and a social media culture where quantity and brevity are the object, everything feels like it has an expiry date. Chenaux’s music offers a serene respite, a kind of non-intrusive intimacy and invitation to daydream. It allows an internal space where thoughts are free to wander, uninterrupted and free-flowing. Delights of My Life sometimes resembles an intriguing hybrid of Mother Earth’s Plantasia, a 1976 electronic album by Mort Garson composed specifically to facilitate plant growth, and a soothing synthesis of Arthur Russell and Chet Baker. Think woozy, semi-improvised jazz ballads colliding with celestial sophisti-pop, a concept akin to what might occur if Talk Talk were avant-garde minimalists from the cosmos, the retrofuturist bent of what sounds like a pocket stylophone occasionally appearing through the cracks like a broken radio frequency attempting to make contact.
Jazz musicians are blessed without the heavy burden of the formula of the song; the three act structure for the 20th century ear. Jazz and classical musicians get to play with pieces rather than songs, which can be filled with conceptual patterns and phrasing more imaginative than verse/chorus/verse/middle-eight/chorus/outro. Sounds which have no end or start might be closer to the realness of the ceaseless present. Here, lines feel blurred between individual tracks, assuming the semblance of a unified composition rather than a collection of distinct pieces. The album beckons, not demands, your attention – allowing you to float in and out of it organically.
Joined by fellow Canadian musicians Philippe Melanson on electric percussion (Bernice, Joseph Shabson, U.S. Girls) and longtime collaborator Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ, the trio expands the palette of Chenaux’s oddly welcoming strangeness with loose, wandering experimentations and open-ended structures, holding time in newfound ways. Often bleary-eyed, slow and sleepy, Delights of My Life is the audio equivalent of hitting the snooze button on your phone’s alarm clock as you slip back into a dream state, drifting into a world beyond temporal constraints where that precious thing – time – is immaterial, giving yourself permission to just be.
