Since his debut album, Music For Prophet (Les Disques du Festival Permanent, 2017), Majorca-born composer Marc Melià, now a long-time resident of Brussels, has been redefining the contours of electronic music through a minimalist, reductionist approach. Melià’s work is much like a solitary hike through the vastness of mountains. On this hike, one carries only the essentials. His work invites listeners on a journey stripped of excess. It focuses instead on the purity of sound and intention.
While some have dismissed monophonic music as overly simplistic, others have embraced its distinct charm. Historical records, such as those by Johannes Quasten, reveal that early Church leaders were drawn to monophonic music because it resonated with the era’s cosmological beliefs, highlighting the harmony and unity of all creation.
In an age of digital abundance, Marc Melià deliberately embraces constraint, crafting an album that thrives within a limited palette of choices. Yet, from these self-imposed boundaries emerges a stunning universe, brimming with rich textures and elegant harmonies. For his debut album, Melià worked exclusively with a Sequential Prophet.
With Pièces Monophoniques, his third LP, he returns armed solely with an analog monophonic synthesizer and handcrafted MIDI sequences etched directly onto a single stereo track.
These recordings seek to uncover beauty within the boundaries of limitations and simplicity, rejecting any embellishments that are not essential. Melià presents the bare skeleton of music, highlighting the power of absence and silence as creative forces. Like the hidden mass of an iceberg, what is not heard becomes as significant as what is heard.
224 Steps – The Pulse Returns
The album navigates the boundary where the quest for an uninhibited emotional response intersects with the mechanical sounds generated by synthesizer circuitry. Despite being a collection of beatless tracks, a pulse occasionally surfaces, like in the closing piece, “224 Steps.
224 Steps – The Pulse Returns & Échoes et Fantasies – the Mirage of Harmony
A sharp sequence blended with multiple delays and reverbs creates the vaporous celestial specter of multiple voices in “Illusions of Polyphony”, while “Échoes et Fantasies” conjures the illusion of dual harmony.
Overture – An Electric Dawn
The expansive reverbs and silences between the euphoric synth phrases in “Overture” transport us to an imaginary magestic landscape shaped out of an electric field.
Resonances – The Art of a Single Note
“Resonances,” a one-note drone-like sequence, embodies the album’s aims as a series of resonances created with the synth filter emerge from the fundamental note.
“Pièces Monophoniques,” aims to contribute to a tradition that dates back to the dawn of humanity. After all, there is no denying that the earliest music crafted by humanity was monophonic, from the soothing lullabies sung to newborns to Gregorian chants, traditional labor songs, and the repertoire of solo compositions by countless composers.
Artist: Marc Melià
Release: Pièces Monophoniques
Label: Vlek
Release Date: May 23, 2025
You must be logged in to post a comment.