Suoni Per Il Popolo: Jardin Botanique and Secondsight
ARTICLE
Z Neto Vinheiras
6/19/20262 min read
Arriving in the room, breathing in, breathing out, tuning in, people seated with eyes closed, Secondsight invites us to take a moment to sit with our feelings and not just listen with our ears. Equipped with a harmonium, a guitar, a laptop and a harp, she tells us stories of dreams and how they metaphorize our reality, our desires and fears. How they inform us of what we might not be seeing very clearly.
Many times her voice resembled FKA Twigs’, this clear though fragile soprano, so tender and soft, almost whispering. She was dressed in layers of white fabric, like an angel there to guide us through a healing journey of some sort. Astrologist and meditation teacher, Haji Maa navigates through themes of love, generational wisdom and shamanism in a bedroom-like dreamy ambient sonic affair.
Headlining the night there was Jardin Botanique, the duo of lovers composed by Kate Bundy and Jean-Guillaume Bastien. They present us their album “Isthmus” in full–a true gift!
Jardin Botanique open their doors to a full idyllic atmosphere–they project into the room what it sounds like to be surrounded by millions of flowers of different species, swaying around you with the wind as you walk, some other blooming from the soil as you step on it. You can feel how much it’s a portal for their own personal experiences as lovers travelling together and which they want to share with the world. In these travels, they collect pictures of flowers which you could also collect some for yourself at the merch table, and are part of the visual experience of the performance–some hands lay and arrange clippings of photographs on a light table in kind of a live collage.
“Isthmus” is a landscape of many colours between faraway places–Montréal and Athens, Georgia–improvisations recorded with experimental synths by the couple and sent to an old friend, John Fernandes, who plays the clarinet in the album. The live performance, which counted only on Fernandes' recordings but not himself, is a journey through friendship and migration, unveiling the encounters of these in-betweens, and crystallizing it somehow in another form of exchange.
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