OROUNI – Aloysius (strings)

“Aloysius (strings)” is the A side of the Allora 7” (December Square), released for the 2020 edition of Record Store Day. The piece is a rearrangement for strings of Orounis’ song “Aloysius”, which appeared on Partitions (2019).

Eternal renewal

The song’s heroine is an elderly woman, who often wonders where her late husband and loved ones are, how many grandchildren she has, or approaches strangers in the street as if she knew who they were. Alzheimer’s disease provokes a constant state of renewal, and this eternal return comes to life in this video. Indeed, it revolves around three Paris-Bastia flights filmed over three consecutive summers. Living in one place while having ties in another provokes a constant back-and-forth: emotionally, geographically, and temporally. Therefore, in the documentary which inspired the song’s lyrics, the elderly woman’s daughter is relentlessly bringing her back to reality while she’s lost in her thoughts and words. Opposing movements clash.

Intense distant memories

The long-term memories of people suffering from Alzheimer’s seem to be less affected than the more recent ones. Thus, our protagonist remembers that she was once a nurse during the Indochina War and manages to describe with some acuteness what she felt at that time, but can no longer distinguish two of her own grandsons. Likewise, when you lived on an island a long time ago, returning there from the mainland evokes memories that are both distant and powerful: smells, sounds, people or words that you did not necessarily think of on a daily basis, but which, once summoned because of your presence in this original territory, manifest themselves intensely, as if they had always been there. The emotion linked to this resurgence of memory is therefore associated with returning to a well-known location.

Mobile point of view

As with the music video for “Nora (piano)”, the B side of Allora, the video for “Aloysius (strings)” is concerned with atmospheric phenomena. But where the first video offered a fixed point of view (almost a locked-down one) in observing moving clouds and a rising or setting sun, the second video takes the viewer along for the ride: this time, it is the eye which moves for the elements, the subject being simultaneously an observer and a motor. Finally, the Côte d´Azur is both a coastline crossed by the Paris-Bastia flight as well as the region where the song’s heroine is from: fitting that it make an appearance in this video. –

Pubblicato da Music Alive