We are delighted to present our latest installment of ‘Whatever You Love You Are’. Having already featured prominently on Fractured Air during 2013 with an extensive interview and travel diaries, Thomas Meluch (AKA Benoît Pioulard) has shared with us an account of his current inspirations. Benoît Pioulard’s latest album ‘Hymnal’ is one of the formidable albums of the year, released earlier this year on the Chicago-based Kranky label. As ever, beautiful touchstones of ambient, lo-fi folk and drone drifts magnificently along the listener’s headspace. ‘Hymnal’ bears the mark of a true artist that offers endless inspiration. Tom, on replying with his contribution, wrote: “Ok Mark, here’s your fair warning that this is probably going to be a bit sappy or overwrought or something, but I assure you it’s all genuine and so on, too. Things sometimes are.” Like everything created by the hand of Thomas Meluch, things indeed sometimes beautifully are.
Words & Photograph: Thomas Meluch
In any case, on the 8th of May my wife and I stopped into the cat adoption facility that we’d been to a few times before, with the notion of meeting a cat that we’d seen on their website – he was a mostly black older cat called Moustachio because of a perfectly shaped curly little moustache on his snout. I would challenge anyone not to do a double take upon seeing it, it was so perfect.
As it turns out, Moustachio had come from the home of a hoarder who had passed away, and this seemed to have traumatised him quite severely; to our dismay he was totally unwelcoming of attention, instead choosing to bury his head in the corner of his crate and avoid any & all contact with us. We were also told that he had a potentially costly heart murmur condition, and being of modest means we weren’t sure whether it would be wise for us to take him on.
Around the time of this sad realisation, though, we caught sight of a tiny little kitten called Charlie, who was just arriving from a different adoption house, and we noticed that he had extraordinarily similar markings to our other cat Baxter…Out of curiosity we asked to see him for a few minutes, which turned into a half hour of playing around and giggling and my wife repeatedly extolling his unmanageable level of cuteness. We made the decision on the spot to take him home.
To make a long story short (“Don’t tell it,” I often joke), it took two weeks of gradual habilitation and introduction, but we renamed him Banjo Edison Bloom (after my wife’s favourite instrument, our favourite inventor and our favourite thing that flowers do) and now he walks around our place like he owns it, but you know, in the best way.
This is all to say that I’ve never had so much exposure to new life (Banjo was just shy of three months old when we received him) and the perspective that it allows you to have ; to imagine seeing & experiencing things for the first time again ; to have such boundless & pure love for everything that surrounds you ; to want nothing more than some food and some intense playtime. Having put music-making on the back burner for a few months I feel more inspired by this than anything else at the moment, and can’t help but feel that I’m internalising it in a way that will only make itself clear after some time has passed.
Oh, and we checked the adoption place’s website the following week, pleased to see that Moustachio had found a home with someone more capable of caring for him.
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“Hymnal” by Benoît Pioulard is out now on Kranky.
http://pioulard.com
soundcloud.com/pioulard
pioulard.bandcamp.com
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