Based between Nantes and Paris, Murailles Music is a non-profit independent music booking agency and record label. Of their recent releases, we’ve covered Eric Chenaux Trio’s Delights of My Life and Sourdurent’s L’Herbe De Détourne. As an agency and label, they are incredibly dedicated to the artists they represent, a passion that comes across in their excellent documentary series Echos, on which we are granted very personal insights into the lives of artists and music creativity. Their latest features artist, composer, singer, songwriter, producer and legendary cosmonaut Borja Flames.
His bio on Murailles Music opens: “He has three brains, a thousand lives, past or parallel, and his name is Borja Flames. Spanish, Parisian, Burgundian, cosmonaut, we don’t know anymore.”
The documentary opens with Borja sitting at his desk, a glowing tribute to the wonders of analogue, covered with artwork and a nearby typewriter. The room has a very bohemian feel, and, surrounded by magazines, he creates a piece of artwork, which, on its dark background, resembles the cover he designed for Catalina Matorral, a joint project with Marion Cousin (who also performs on his latest album, Nuevo Medievo – 2022).
As he reveals, shapes or objects play an essential role in his music–he is ‘gifted’ with synesthesia and perceives music as objects. When he reveals that he is colourblind, he also questions whether ‘one truth in colour perception’ exists. Themes around perception and reality, and space and time, continually crop up, and he recalls how, as a child, he would spin on the spot to music until he lost his balance–an escape from reality. Today, he instead loses his sense of reality through musical practice–music that bends space and time.
His desire to take the listener on a mental journey is underpinned but his non-standard creative approach. He abhors ‘standardised music’ and what he refers to as the ‘toxic binary format’, one created by ‘market forces’ and ‘all that goes in the same direction as the capitalist system’. It’s both a beautiful insight into Borja’s music and an informative documentary that offers plenty of food for thought.
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