As always with Bruno Green, groove is a fundamental, natural component. Everything else seems to unravel from it. Sounds infiltrate, insidiously, before revealing their harmonic potential. Nothing flies off at random in this low, heavy sky across which a few of Wim Wenders' angels navigate. Intoxicating and swaying, urban and muffled, the music of *The Mellotone Project* advances as if masked, in a game of false leads and traps, oscillating between its references and its generic openings.

A sound sculptor, Bruno Green has long blended electronic and acoustic elements. In this enclave of creative freedom that constitutes the three volumes of *The Mellotone Project*, he pushes even further in his attempt at total art and integral communication, backing the project with photographic objects—The Poegraphies Series—and poetic images and words from Berlin titled « Freischwimmer im kalten Wasser » (Open Water Swimmer in Cold Waters).

Music, graphic design, imagery, and literature thus feed this total project, which resonates through speakers and which each listener can make their own, within this different relationship to time, empathy, and humility... A magical pause amidst the noise of the world and the imposed race of a clock built for us. A gentle return to the intimate that seals our universality.

THE MELLOTONE PROJECT seems to begin with a stocktaking. APOSTATE descends upon Berlin from the sky, like the angels of Wim Wenders. Slightly overhead, slightly in discovery, yet filled with what could constitute a common reference and an abstract community, functioning as a series of poetic filters. With its abrupt rhythmic breaks and Floydian soarings, its references to Bowie, and its atmospheres both airy and deleterious, this first volume resembles a reconnaissance flight, making long concentric circles, turning in search of magic, of history, and of its actors. Between foundational new-wave and electro-trip-hop, if these voiceless songs settle "Au vent des peines" (In the Wake of Sorrows), it is only to better follow, like a somnambulist, the loops and meanders of the "Wannsee" through the city, before waking abruptly as an "Apostate." Sure of nothing but the value of his own life and memories, of this search for a time fully lived and not lost... Everything will momentarily end in a vintage telephone beep at the end of the line.

Apostate: A person who publicly renounces a doctrine, belief, or authority, refusing to follow the guiding line or submit to it.

THE MELLOTONE PROJECT continues its exploration of the city, this time at pavement level, amidst asphalt and wild grass. As if landing, GOLDEN BOY is more introspective, carving out improbable paths, floating and twirling, as whimsical as it is uncontrollable. After crossing wild and hostile territories, man renounces his wings to invent new ones on solid ground. As if, after the time of rejecting religions, beliefs, and external orders, it were now necessary to invent one's own ways. Between the intimate and the universal, in a form of appeasement and chiaroscuro, Berlin now reveals itself at human scale. Between the streets and the parks, man slips into the possibility of his utopia, both bohemian and joyful in this felicity, within the energy of a happy and appeased despair. Nothing is set in stone. Everything slides and overlaps, immerses and floats in suspension. We will refrain from trying to define the ghostly voice of "Dark as dark can be." In the lights of Sigur Rós and Arvo Pärt, GOLDEN BOY invents its own form of redemption—not religious, but profoundly sacred and, above all, rooted in an imperative need for communion. Alone and together. Unique and universal.

Will there be a conclusion, or merely an opening, to The Mellotone Project? The question remains suspended. These "Love Particles," in any case, navigate the lands of Brian Eno and the repetitive music of Steve Reich. The Berlin setting was perfectly established, both in the sky and on earth. It is undoubtedly time, then, to let oneself be carried by the breath, whether sacred or profane. With wings abandoned on the ground, other means of locomotion must be found... Percussive sounds that spin and caper, breathless in volutes. The particles now dare dissonance, difference, and flight, undoubtedly because they know they are loved or about to be. Noises accumulate and set in motion a carousel that turns slowly, very slowly, to the rhythm of breathing. The atmosphere is resolutely electro-ambient. The sudden stratospheric surge of "Der blaue Reiter," followed by the children's laughter in "Love Particles" and the adolescent choir mixed with sirens in "Warschauer Straße," stands as a condensation of history—that is, of suffering and hope... In this half-hour of contemplative and poised stillness, like a sieve filtering the noises of the world, silence and pauses reclaim their right. The listener yields to their own questioning and inner reverie. Love is an ultimate refuge, assuredly. And perhaps that is the lesson of this MELLOTONE PROJECT.

Review by Goulven Hamel.