Eve Risser - Des pas sur la neige (2015)

"It took a while for Eve Risser to consider herself a "pianist". Also playing flute, toy instruments and amplified objects, whatever she can use in a venue without a piano, the French musician envisioned this instrument only as a sonic resource among others. That changed in the last few years. Now she humbly says: "above all, I like the idea of trying to be a pianista".

Des pas sur la neige is the definitive confirmation that it already happened. More: that she is now one of the most compelling pianists in Europe and the world. The turning point was the release of En Corps, an acclaimed CD in trio with Benjamin Duboc and Edward Pérraud. Since then, her solo piano activity and her trios, quartets and ensemble (the new White Desert Orchestra) became a definitive surrendering to the black and white keyboard and to the inner guts of the beast invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in the turning of the 17th to the 18th centuries.

Her use of moving preparations, very different from the fixed ones by John Cage, is unique: sometimes it sounds like a dulcimer or a synthesizer, others like percussion devices, and others still like anything you heard before. The extraordinary thing is that the piano identity is always preserved.

If Eve Risser distinguished herself as a membre of the Orchestre National de Jazz during the direction of Daniel Yvinec and with the project The New Songs, this new path put her under special attention. For this new opus she tried to resonate her "interior landscapes with the outside landscapes" (her own words), inspired by the snows of the Nordic regions, "the spirit of nothingness in the desert". The result is so beautiful that you hardly can believe it..."-Clean Feed