Soel is the solo project of Pascal Ohs, the trumpeter who got his start playing on St. Germain’s acclaimed album Boulevard. Ohs has played with the French electronic music group for roughly the last ten years, and with the production help and direction of Ludovic Navarre of St. Germain, Ohs releases Momento. Momento is a combination of producer Ludovic Navarre’s electronic influence and Ohs’s own R & B and jazz background. Soel, as the cover of Momento states and as Ohs’s music communicates, is Navarre’s protégé, bringing treading electronic beats alongside a fluid funk.
The album is infused with highly danceable beats and a rhythmic sound that reflects a patterned and spiritually moving consideration of the human condition, of existence, of pain and of the harmony in the world Pascal Ohs lives in. “My Soul Wants to Sing” asks a higher spiritual power to calm the singer’s tumultuous soul, which has seen worldly pain and cannot remain silent: “I once saw a mother cry / I once held a brother while he died / I looked to God and asked him why / My soul wants to sing.”
In “The Earth Mother,” the singer’s soul is conveyed as penetrating the earth, traveling to its origin, a foundation deeper than the roots of all plants, deeper than stones and deeper than the earth itself, and communing with it through music and dance. The repetitive nature of the musical loops and of the lyrical structure in “The Earth Mother” establishes a trance-like state in the song that brings a harmony between the soul, the listener and the earth mother, the subject of the song. Soel’s travel beyond the center of the earth, to the earth dream, is a journey through the universe to truth, which Soel represents as a set of rhythmic and musical principles that are beyond infinity.
The concluding track, “We Have Died Already,” considers the worth of the material, social and emotional world that Soel lives in. Is the “fear and the guilty” of existence worth it if “we have died already?” In this song, Soel uses the steady hypnotic rhythms and floating jazz improvisations on guitar trumpet and flute to create a rich texture that is characteristic of Soel’s music.
Though the songs from Momento feature very similar characteristic and do not diversify much from the initial song form, laid out in “Le Vicomte,” Momento moves beautifully from light and non-reflective music, lacking lyrics or any interposed meaning, to the spiritual and then to a deep spiritual and philosophical state by the time the album has reached “We Have Died Already.” The album ends on a seemingly dismal, yet in actuality uplifting note, because the understanding, which culminates in an understanding about death, is a deep spiritual enlightenment, which is far from sadness. It is this kind of deeply spiritual knowledge that Soel is striving after in Momento.
