All of Hypno5e’s albums are like musical treasure chests containing various literary threads, which are best listened to in one sitting and in order to appreciate their structure and narrative progression. It’s said that artists always tell the same story. If that’s true, it takes on a different form each time. In this case, the narrative of Trame Noire is shifting, more elusive, fragile as well, and darker than that of their previous album, Shéol.
Trame Noire, a setting, but above all a small ecosystem that serves as a landscape. At first unfamiliar and ever-changing, it eventually comes to resemble the character’s inner meanderings—the character who is both actor and spectator in his own painting, which he creates as he walks alongside his ghosts. Here, the flutter of a wing can change everything. A leaf falls, a memory resurfaces, and what crystallizes as fear in the shadow of a gnarled branch turns out to be a source of comfort in the pale yet brilliant glow of the moon. The shapes, the sounds, the shifting light—everything is doubt and adaptation, discovery and mystery.
Trame Noire’s music unfolds as this untamed landscape evolves, to the point where it’s no longer clear which came first. The opening piano notes of Lost Fires, fragile yet bold raindrops, elegantly raise the curtain on this scene. The score is already unpredictable. Like the protagonist, we are initially disoriented. Lost among these instruments, delicate yet gigantic monsters in constant flux. The prodigious guitars dance and seem to take shape with the breath of the wind. The voice oscillates between clear singing and desperate cries, while the drums, sometimes in the background, often overwhelming, create a living, shape-shifting skeleton that perfectly structures the work. A misty labyrinth made of nocturnal mirages with invisible walls, in which unpredictability ultimately becomes our guide. It becomes alluring, indispensable. A whirlwind that reaches its climax with Molecular Angel—dense, short, and punchy—the central track and turning point of the album and the world it depicts.
The tracks on Trame Noire cast indomitable shadows that we eventually come to embrace as an integral part of our own present-day landscape. One that will eventually belong to the past. Having at times chased them and at others fled from them, we can now seek out our own ghosts within these shadows and embrace them, the ashes of a past that will never be again. This is what makes them so enigmatic and ever-changing, but above all, so endearing. It is also what makes Trame Noire, the eponymous track, so beautiful. The chords of a delicate harmonium settle into a haunting yet gentle finale, though it remains tinged with melancholy. “L'aube disperse sur la forêt quelques lambeaux de nuit" ("Dawn scatters a few shreds of night across the forest"), a voice tells us, and then, in a glimmer of hope, the sun rises.
