He's one of only five musicians who professionally perform with this magnificent instrument, made up of 56 chromatically tuned glass rods and played by rubbing them with wet fingers. It's called the Cristal Baschet, and Loup Barrow has been attached to it since he crossed paths with the Baschet brothers from France, the inventors of this crystal organ. We were fortunate to get an up close and personal look when he came to play it and one of the tracks from his new album, Immineo , the first in a forthcoming trilogy. This is a LifeMinute with Loup Barrow.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Lou Barraud and you're watching Life Minute TV.
00:05He's only one of five musicians in the world who perform professionally with this magnificent
00:09instrument made up of 56 chromatically tuned glass rods that are played by rubbing them
00:16with wet fingers.
00:18It's called the Crystal Boucher and Lou Barraud has been attached to it ever since he crossed
00:23paths with its French inventors, the Boucher brothers.
00:27We were fortunate to get an up-close-and-personal look when he came to play it and one of his
00:31tracks from his new album, Imaneo, the first in a forthcoming trilogy.
00:36This is a Life Minute with Lou Barraud.
00:39Yeah, for me it's three parts.
00:42The first album, it's low tempo, it's quite, you can feel the horizon, it's big and it's
00:50quite slow pieces.
00:53It was quite a solitary process.
00:56I was in exile in Finistère.
01:01It's a place with lots of nature, sea, and walking in the morning, thinking and playing
01:13alone.
01:15That's something I like because I live in Paris and in Paris it's a lot of noise everywhere,
01:20a lot of people talking.
01:22In Brittany, in Finistère, it's quiet and it's nature.
01:27For me it's the balance between both of them.
01:30The second album is more, it's the heart beating, it's more rhythmical, another type of writing.
01:37I'm writing this more in places where it's busy.
01:43The third album will be the head, the spirit, the soul and that will be, I will record with
01:50my instrument and just a choir in a cathedral or a place like that.
01:57The main instrument in the album is the crystal bachet and it's an instrument, you can hear
02:04nature in this instrument, the bass, the roaring, it's like thunder and the high part of the
02:11instrument it's like light in the sky and you can hear also the sea because it's a friction
02:19instrument, you play the instrument with water on your fingers.
02:23It's a sound sculpture, you can see the instrument in a few museums because it's also a sculpture
02:31and you put your finger in the water and it's glass roads, it's a keyboard of glass but
02:41the sound you hear, it's the friction, it's the same technique as when you put your finger
02:46on a glass but it's not the same acoustic system.
02:50The crystal, the sound you hear is from the metal part which is vibrating, this metal
02:55part is giving the pitch of the note, it's not the glass.
02:59The name crystal is a reference for the sound, not for the technique or for the acoustic
03:06of the instrument.
03:07It's big and I have to carry it everywhere I go, it's like 220 pounds, you need to do
03:22lots of push-ups to carry the instrument and for the sound, for me it's like a blue whale
03:31and a cello and also a human voice, difficult to blend everything together and the instrument
03:41is like a satellite in the sky, there's a big part, a steel part, the name of this part
03:51is the flame and I think the sound of the instrument is really this part which is making
03:58the sound, making the soul of the instrument.
04:01My parents are musicians, I play music since I'm 3 or 4 years old and I met people because
04:09I travel a lot, I met a man Petr Spatina in Venice and he was playing the glass, he was
04:18very good, playing very fast and I was a young man and I went to see him and I said I want
04:24to do the same thing and I came back to France, I make an instrument and I played with this
04:33instrument a few years but I was searching for more bass, more polyphonic technique because
04:40this instrument is more monophonic and after that I met the Baschet brothers who invented
04:47the instrument in 1952 and I met them, they were based next to Paris and we were friends
04:58after that for nearly 20 years and after that it's an adventure because you can't have this
05:05instrument like that, you need to go, they will check your playing and they will approve
05:14or not and they approved, now I've got my instrument.
05:20Nobody taught me how to play, I had few techniques, I knew one or two people playing but me, I
05:28was a violinist, I was a drummer, I was not into a keyboard and the other players were
05:35into keyboard, they gave me some techniques and after that I was just improving and searching
05:41for new techniques because it's a young instrument, you can find new techniques all the time,
05:47it's difficult when you play guitar and piano, you can find new techniques but you have to
05:54work a lot.
05:55What's important is emotion and music or when you meet someone it's the emotions and what
06:04I want to achieve, it's just to create emotion and even if it's bad or good, that's the only
06:14thing I want to achieve with other people I don't know, if I can touch them, it's very nice.
06:22I'm going to play Passio, it's a piece from the album, Eminem.
06:34It's beautiful.
07:04It's beautiful.
07:34It's beautiful.
08:04It's beautiful.
08:34To hear more of this interview, visit our podcast Life Minute TV on iTunes and all streaming
08:41podcast platforms.