Sounds of dream and umbra [with Bal Onirique]
I walk through the portal, where once there was a store, and now there's a rehearsal room and... a lounge. The first impression here is overwhelming: incense and shrines, antiques and draperies, and on walls there are art clippings: Modigliani, Klimt, Dali... all in honor of those who held the primary Oneiric Ball. Another door, flanked by a black curtain, hides the action, the instruments, pulsions, the birth of a work...In June 2013, Bal Onirique play two gigs in Oporto and Lisbon. Preps are done carefully but the ambience is slight : always playing at home, anyway. In each room friends are met, who come faithfully, never like someone who goes just for another gig, but as one who meets comrades in arms. After fine-detailed sound checks, and lively dinners, the path to the stage is done. Worn sidewalks, dark hallways, gaps through the audience, and there's the stage. Thick sound hovers, and everything is expression, shape and soul, backlit explosions, heavy mist on the rise, boiling imaginations, crescent moons, time suspended...In the end, when stage lights fade and smoke dies away, there's a kind of return to Earth. Winding up cables and shutting cases, dragging amplifiers and greeting the most raptured fans. Almost no rest, just tidying up stuff and celebrate with some drinks. Magic faded, but is all lost? Again, the rehersal room's door will open, under the gaze of Klimt's Danaė, Nietzsche's echoes and the coolness of an extinct censer, and a whole creative universe will boil again, desecrated memories and exalted eroticisms, a whole of mysteries never actually revealed...
