Farida Amadou & Pavel Tchikov - MAL DE TERRE (2021)

“MAL DE TERRE” is the first collaboration between Belgium-based bassist Farida Amadou & guitarist Pavel Tchikov. Roughly translated, “MAL DE TERRE” means “earth sickness”, or a kind of nausea one feels when connecting back to land after a long journey at sea (Tchikov also adds “It might also be construed as a nostalgic memory of a forsaken land.”), and certainly a feeling of unease is threaded through the cassette’s two sides. Using bass, looped guitar, electronics & tape echo, the duo of Amadou & Tchikov channel the “ Désorientation”, or “disorientation” - something like “culture shock,” (for those times when culture shock isn’t enough to capture what you’re feeling) - and nervous excitement for a new place, coupled with homesickness & frustration for the old place, often attributed to “decountryfication”. Tchikov explains, “…It’s a spontaneous take on nostalgia of forsaken personal roots. We’ve both left our native countries as we were children. We’re happy of that, but there’s something missing anyway. Something we still feel connected to, but it’s far away. So that’s what we tried to put into this record. We wanted to conserve the roughness of the music in order to keep our fragility unveiled. There’s no editing or overdubs there, not even lots of mixing. It is as it was played. And we hope it to be an honest album.” The darkly lit, near-industrial landscape conjured forth by Amadou & Tchikov certainly retains an aura of dread; strings clang, feedback whooshes past, cacophonous clattering jumps out, something akin to a siren wails, but underneath it all (or perhaps through it all) a sliver of light emerges.