Alex Henry Foster - A Measure of Shape and Sounds (2024)

Following an extensive European tour in 2022, Foster had to undergo in 2023, a cardiac double-graft surgery, a procedure initially planned to be a 4-hour intervention that turned into a 10-hour life-threatening tour de force for the surgeon. While a success, the prolonged period of intubation after the surgery, along with the several blood transfusions needed, would have a devastating effect on Foster, as added to his fragile physical state, he would have to endure months unable to talk, not knowing if he would have the ability to sing in the future, the significant blood loss contributing to severe episode of memory fogs, incoordination, dizziness and substantial headaches, having for direct result the impossibility for him to read, write, play guitar, or look at a screen. For a usually ongoing individual and upbeat type, he was now powerless.

Slowly starting to regain energy, at least just enough to envision the possibility of being able to dedicate the few functioning hours of his days, Foster contacted his friend and longtime creative accomplice Ben Lemelin (co-writer and multi-instrumentalist for his live band The Long Shadows) to assist him with what initially seemed a sort of positive recovery venture before he realized the ambitious amplitude of what Foster wanted to dwell on and accomplish considering his fragile physical and cognitive state.

Following Kimiyo, what would eventually become the second chapter of Voyage à la Mer, A Measure of Shape and Sounds, is an intimate journey of its own, representing a profound personal breathe-in made of several layers of guitar loops, reverberations, resonances, and oscillations juxtaposed together to create a sonic multi-directional contemplative maelstrom. Purposely recorded live to capture as direct a flow as possible, the songs embodied at that exact moment carried their human disposition not only to abandon oneself to the motion but to become one with it. Foster mentioned: “It felt like the representation of an organic movement that could ultimately break us free from the echo chamber we might have been trapped in and therefore end the emotional twirl and affective cycle of redundancy that too often comes with our emptiness and desperation.”

He adds: “Even though I had the conviction that we had guided Kimiyo as far as we had to without spoiling its natural beam of light by suddenly adding the shadows of our ambitions to it all, Ben and I felt there was more to explore, as so many additional fragments of musical landscapes instinctively surfaced while we kept dwelling on the vivid sensations we were both still being impacted with at that precise instant.”

Instrumental by choice and minimalist by design, it was capital for Foster that A Measure of Shape and Sounds stood as its own living organism, not as a faire-valoir or add-on to the growing entity that Voyage à la Mer was becoming. If Momoka incarnated Kimiyo’s voice, Foster was adamant about the fact that “no introspection is really yours until you voice it yourself.” In that sense, the album would provide an ongoing soundtrack to that internal self-searching reflection inviting us to lift ourselves forward, to tame the other bonding voices to which we usually surrender our longing desires for freedom.