The name of Avi C. Engel floats on the surface of Too Many Souls, an artist whose music is an exception in terms of musicality and eludes classification. Let's take a moment to look back at this confidential record, released in February 2024.
At the roots of a transfigured music, with the circular waves suggested by the cover, the acoustic textures on several instruments (Gudok, talharpa, percussion, melodica, guitars) are the continuum of a poetry transfigured from the past to the present. To the traditional folk music of Wayfaring Stranger, Avi C. Engel adds lyrics reminiscent of folk tales, notably in Hold This Flame, which opens the album. But there's a metaphysical strangeness to the lyrics here that's reinforced by the musical backdrop. It's a sonic, immersive experience that requires you to be involved in the field of emotions that unfold throughout the compositions. All expanding, omens and visions become ghost traps.
Too Many Souls is all about auditory (phrases, noises, musical sounds, etc.), visual and chromatic sensations. It's a total stripping down that goes beyond the self. We remain in a kind of synopsis, until the tipping point embodied by Without Any Eyes, whose heaviness dislocates around strings and tremolo guitars, a haunted musicality that permeates the bark, joining the sap and irrigating the body. The rhythm builds around percussion, like a ritual that folk music breathes with its own essence.
In addition to the images suggested by their texts, Avi improvises a whole series of drawings in handmade ink, following a path inspired by their visions. Too Many Souls is a journey in which everything new fills the void left by what has remained inert until now. The passage now your heart is empty represents the envelope into which poetry slips, revitalised by this other substance. Avi C. Engel's musical outbursts reach us like an unknown language, signals scrambled like the obscure natural geometry whose illusion leads us to believe that we will find the secrets of everything. But this is not the case: we have to visit each element to understand its existence. To this day, Too Many Souls remains an album on which we must constantly draw, to find the rest and beauty lacking in this artificial world.
