This album has been financed by my friends and family in order to create a more decent version of the audio recordings of the Crépuscules I've written.

Crépuscule no. 1-11

Crépuscule no.7

Crepuscule no 7

Crépuscule no.1-11

Crépuscule no.4

Crepuscule no 4

Crépuscule no.5

Crepuscule no 5

Crépuscule no.9

Crepuscule no 9

Crépuscule no.3

Crepuscule no 3

This album has been financed by my friends and family in order to create a more decent version of the audio recordings of the Crépuscules.

Crépuscule no.1

Crepuscule no 1

Crépuscule no.6

Crepuscule no 6

Crépuscule no.11

Crepuscule no 11

from the heart of dusk

Enregistrement avec microphone parabolique stéréo en février 2023 à la réserve Naturelle de Lesgau (Saint Martin de seignanx).
C'est une zone humide où des centaines de grues cendrées se retrouvent chaque année pour hiverner. On entend ici leurs échanges animés au crépuscule. D'autres espèces d'oiseaux, plus discrets, sont également présents : canard colvert, vanneau huppé, sarcelle d'hiver, grèbe castagneux.
Photo : Paul Drey

Chants des Grues Cendrées au crépuscule_Réserve Naturelle de Lesgau_Hiver 2023

- www.artificialis.nl - [statement]

Robbie's first encounter with music was at the age of 6 when one of his aunts gave him a bugle to play on. Few months after Robbie was alowed to rehearse with the local fanfare and kept playing the bugle for 1 year and the baritone 1 year after that. After getting his 'A' diploma, Robbie then returned the lent baritone and said: "Now I have enough" and stopped playing a brass instrument. Yet, a few years later, when he was 11, he found a keyboard on the attic and played it fondly. When his parents could not hold out much longer to hear the same tune over and over (pippy longstockings), his mother then decided Robbie needed 
piano lessons and brought him to a teacher in Groningen: 'Jan Meiborg'.

Quickly became clear that Robbie enjoyed this much and took lessons for 7 years. Here he learned much about improvisation in blues and learned to get more in touch with the piano in general. The last study was on a piece of Franz Liszt: 'Liebestraum no.3'. Jan dared a bet: "If you can play this piece well within 4 weeks, I'll buy you a chocolate cake." So the challenge was accepted. Yet... Robbie was young and became more busy with other things than the piano and Robbie knew he was going to fail.

Thus, with a loss, yet with no side of the bargain, Robbie bought a chocolate cake himself for Jan, and without any words, the both of us knew that this would be the last time of the study. 

Which became more clear the coming year. Robbie did not even touch a piano for over a year and was hanging around with his friends more often. Yet after that specific year, he came home to his parents house... Looked at the piano... Thought to himself: "Could I?... then... Should I?" and began improvising with no one else in the room. Finally he accepted that this had to be his main course. 

** Read the full story on artificialis.nl ** (available in lots of languages but dutch is the main language and the rest is probably pretty poorly translated by machine translation)

New tracks tagged #Crepuscule