Orphan Lament is like the person is walking into an old church hours after everyone has left and there is only a faint foot-step and a single candle that is still flickering. The baritone of Johann Le Roux comes out heavy and intentional as the smoke of wood in hidden corners, every note filled with something formless and not describable. You do not listen, you feel the ground itself recalling all the sorrows that have ever gone.
Fingerpicked guitar of Romuald Ballet-Baz in its response is patient as wind in open highlands, delicate, but persevering and pentatonic phrases surging and descending like breathing life. It is neither hurried nor overloaded--space, deep, holy space, in which the silences do as much to create meaning as the notes. It is minimalism and not the reduction but the revelation.
I started listening in anticipation of a faithful interpretation and what I got was more or less communion. It is no homage to appearance, but three Breton musicians, across time and space, sitting beside Robbie Basho wherever he happens to be at the moment and contributing their share of sorrow to his. The diminished key drags all the way down, and earthing the lamentation until it is like dirt under your nails, like access to something greater than loneliness.
As the ending chord breaks up, there is a sense of an expansion of my surroundings, a coolness, but there is a sense of an increased presence in the surroundings. Orphan Lament does not require your attention, it merely lingers, like granite, till you find you have been standing still, hating to disturb the holiness. Steel & Velvet have brought something so limited in the folk genre: a version that does not rhyme about abandonment but lets you live in it full of four minutes. And wondrously there is comfort in that pang.
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