The Sea Refuses No River: Reflections on Jean Patier’s Visitation
Arborescence (Jean Patier)
Visitation
(2024)
Visitations is the third solo album by musician Jean Patier’s project, Arborescence. These nine compositions evoke the serene and mysterious fragrance of walking through forgotten ruins. Each piece acts as a kind of musical “lectio divina”; a scriptural reading of the word as it wells up sonically through the book of nature.
Follow the forgotten traces of weathered stone walls, inscribed on them are the commanding gestures of time. These windows into the past serve as lures of beauty, refracted in the elusive forms of nature. To walk into these ruins is to walk into a sanctuary where a profound and sacred intuition may be preserved. Here the storms of time have swept through and yet the deep wells of the past remain unscathed, a testament to the power of beauty and form. Walk attentively through these thresholds, and in these quiet hours of musical contemplation, may a serene repose guide your footsteps.
The cord is cut, an infant cries, the journey begins. Curiosities of the outside world flood into a consciousness like summer sunlight through a leaded window. Reflected, refracted, jostled and bounced around but alive—always alive.
The hours and days pass. Weeks become years and then decades. What began as a crystal-clear meandering brook, becomes a river, the river a tsunami. A tsunami of images dulled by time. Images of such number that they can’t be counted, they are who and what we are—our being, and ours to use freely.
Life’s spiral tower of moments lifts its head to the horizons as we age. Every step up, we change. We create the newness that is us. Up, and around we move… and up further, not knowing if the next step is our last or—if the road goes on everlastingly, revealing skylines and vistas unimaginable.
We are forever standing on the shoulders of the past and we call to it through a lost history that was never really lost. It’s there now. It was always there—like a loyal dog with only one directive engraved in its evolutionary history. Past failures, triumphs, loves and losses—we own them all, and they are friends.
Downward we glance and notice that we’ve climbed so high up life’s structure. Memories are below us, swirling in a miasmic vortex of the what could be, the very nearly. Past events define us now but only if we choose to remember and only if we choose to act in accordance with them.
For we are different now, in this present. The river has moved us, shot us through the rapids of this life and, we’ve changed. And with this change, we choose what to remember.
The choice is ours to make.
Our next action is purchased. Remembrance and change—the alchemical ingredients that act as the coin of life’s realm.
Visitation by Arborescence is a duality. Over the course of its nine pieces, we drift down the river, back into time. Back into deep time if you are so inclined. Cyclic time if you let it and can interpret the signs like the old mystics. I would imagine it’s hard reading those runes but, by all means—give it a try, you may surprise yourselves.
Visitation is something else too. It’s the leading edge of the river, creating with every past contact a virtual future that, within a flutter of an eyelash becomes an actual present… and then a distant memory, coalesced with all the other memories at our disposal.
Moving forward, horizon after horizon, event after event. Moving forward to a sea of eternity.
—Michael Eisenberg
The sea refuses no river
And right now this river’s banks are blown
The sea refuses no river
Whether stinking and rank
Or red from the tank
Whether pure as a spring
There’s no damned thing stops the poem
The sea refuses no river
And this river is homeward flowing—From “The Sea Refuses no River” by Pete Townshend
My name is Jean Patier. I am Franco-American, 30 years old. I am a musician, a pianist and a music producer. I got a BA inphilosophy and then an MA at the California Institute of Integral Studies in Philosophy and Comparative Religion. I am steeped in the tradition of deep listening (Oliveros), soundscape (Schaffer) and the music of Robert Rich and Brian Eno. I now live in rural France where I make music and take care of my homestead where I live with my wife and son.
I am interested in the meeting points of music and sound, which is the seat of the imagination as it seeks to bring sounds into an intelligible unity. My submission album explores that musical ambiguity, seeking to stimulate the listener’s imagination so that the sounds may well up into consciousness as an intimate reality.
—Jean Patier
Merging ambient, neoclassical, and psychedelic genres, Arborescence creates deep musical environments that promote a contemplative state. Through the use of textures, atmospheric design and electro-acoustic soundscapes, Arborescence brings the listener’s ears close to the tree trunks, to the stones, and to the passing clouds.
The complete catalog of music from Arborescence can be explored at the bandcamp page. Take a step into nature, a step into the sublime.
I have had this album on repeat for the last few hours. It is oddly haunting, yet comforting at the same time—a tenebrous tapestry of layered, liminal listening.
Yeah, this is one of those albums that works on two fronts depending on the disposition of the listener.
Like Eno’s work—one can just press play/repeat and go about their daily routine while this provides gently shifting atmospheres in the background. It sounds like that’s what you were doing Marco.
Alternately, if the listener wants to experience the work in a deeper way—one that respects the intentional set and setting the listener creates for themself… the album will definitely reward that as well. That’s how I engaged with it (I rarely do background listening these days) and every listen was different, and rewarding in its own way.
I listened while writing yesterday’s newsletter, so it was, in a way, background/foreground at the same time. It certainly helped shape mood and inspiration.
excellent-I love it when the sounds do their work. I would also imagine this album works very well on a scenic drive.
I wonder where my comment on this music went??
And Michael Eisenberg’s reply??
That’s a good question
@madrush
I know there was more to this conversation than what is here right now. At first I thought it was a matter of some of it being a “topic” and another bit of it being in the comments of the post itself, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Any idea Marco?