UMAN - Chaleur Humaine

  • The stunning New Age vision of French siblings Danielle and Didier Jean, unearthed by Freedom To Spend.
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  • Some incredible footage of the early '90s performance by Iasos recently emerged on social media. The curly maned New Age pioneer vibes out beatifically on a synthesizer in a room full of fervent acolytes. The middle-aged crowd is fully lost in the transcendent qualities of Inter-Dimensional Music. One woman pulls shapes you might expect to see in a Pentecostal church. A trio chair dances, a woman fans herself rhythmically, a man spins in a circle. Otherwise normal-looking people do weird dances with the blissful lack of self-consciousness that defined the camcorder era. On their 1992 debut album, Chaleur Humaine, Danielle and Didier Jean, the two French siblings who record as UMAN, demonstrate a towering New Age ambition. "We wanted to go beyond the oceans, the mountains, to explore humanity and to snuggle up to the heart of human beings," they said on the recently reissued 19-track record. This lofty goal was reflected in an intricate sound that mixed Ensoniq samplers and futuristic vocal processing with flugelhorn, trumpets and an orchestra pit's worth of synthesized instruments. Brief intermissions feature varying readings of a poetic refrain—"It's this force, almost animal, warm, like a kiss, fresh like the morning dew, that we call human warmth"—in Russian, Arabic, Vietnamese and Hebrew. This byzantine vision of world harmony through Rainforest Cafe-style New Age music is audacious, and requires the kind of wide-eyed belief on brilliant display in the video mentioned above. It could easily crumble under the weight of its own ambition into a Babel of confusing styles. But even in the present, it holds together as a novel and coherent statement almost entirely in its own lane. The press text accompanying Chaleur Humaine treads lightly in making sonic comparisons to its dense sonic worlds, mentioning Cocteau Twins and Enya in reference to Danielle's soaring, often wordless vocal style, as well as the Portuguese minimalist Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba LP. These references are in the ballpark, but don't quite get you there. The siblings Jean holed up in their home studio in Orsay, France, and came out with something that sounds like Juilliard-trained aliens who spent the late '80s taking in sunset sets at Café del Mar. It's difficult music to describe, but I'll try. The lush pads, harpsichords and inventive vocal chopping on tracks like "UMAN Spirit" put me in mind of Art Of Noise. Lumbering downtempo beats make occasional appearances, while tracks like "Atmosphère" resemble the globally minded New Age fusion of Mark Isham's early Windham Hill catalogue. Similarly, the frequent ventures into Middle Eastern scales and humid hand-drumming on "Human Warmth" point towards the experimental world music concepts issued by Crammed's Made To Measure series. The outro of "Human," perhaps my favourite song on the record, is baroque, luxuriant pop music redolent of the elegant '80s. Meanwhile, the proto-Autotune and harpsichord action on the penultimate track, "Ménestre," resembles some PC Music affiliate trying their hand at '90s R&B. Which is to say: it sounds like nothing else at all. In order to make a placeless music, artists must free themselves of any preconceived notions of commercial success or critical reception. They must dispose of cool, calculating remove in favor of full immersion in their art. It makes sense, then, that the Jean siblings released pop music that failed to connect prior to inventing their own musical language. Buda Musique, the label that would issue the legendary Éthiopiques series, put out Chaleur Humaine in 1992. Windham Hill and various chill-out comps picked up on the vibe a few years later, licensing tracks like "The White Spirit." But Danielle and Didier never fit neatly into a scene and they still don't. To conform, the Jeans would need to adopt some signs and signifiers of an existing tradition—whether the crystal vibrations of the New Age scene or druggy euphoria of downtempo and ambient house. Instead, they took the less-traveled route, forging their own extraordinary path.
  • Tracklist
      A1 Человечность A2 UMAN Spirit A3 Aubade A4 Human Warmth A5 Entrelacs A6 Mémoire Vive A7 Chaleur Humaine B1 البشري الحرارة B2 Cordes Sensibles B3 Atmosphère B4 Calor Humano B5. Hơi ấm của nhân loại B6 Lalala B7 Menselijke Warmte B8 Ménestrel B9 אנושית אש
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