music’s sake,’ returns with ‘Ma Fleur,’ a stripped-down symphony bearing several storytellers and a message of hope. Piano, strings, saxophone, drums and vocal parts delicately interplay in this minimal masterpiece, which is

Jason’s soundtrack for the cycles of life: loss encountered and love fulfilled.

Such abstract and universal themes are Jason’s focus; ‘self-indulgent’ records are trivial for an artist and producer who relies upon the medium of music for mass communication, for unification. For him, music should be inclusive and wide-reaching, just as opening track ‘To Build a Home,’ carries the line: ‘A place where I don’t feel alone.’ The vocal ‘I’ is always a byword for ‘You’ or ‘We’ with The Cinematic Orchestra; music is a magical soundscape where self and other are one. ‘I build a home / For you, for me, / Until you disappear / From me, from you...’ runs newcomer Patrick Watson’s tentative lyric, as the piano melody mounts and stirs, while core TCO member Phil France’s double bass provides the sturdy backbone upon which this beautiful tune hangs. The record itself is supported by a screenplay Jason commissioned to a like-minded old friend. ‘Ma Fleur’’s script is inhabited by three or four characters, whose individual worlds ‘collide to create new universes,’ and whose rich and vividly felt emotions steer the movements

of this symphony. Taking inspiration from directors like Tarantino and the experimental time scale of ‘Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind’ (2004), the chronology of the record’s script can be ‘broken up,’ so that the various phases of human life make sense as a whole.

This holistic approach in turn corresponds to The Cinematic Orchestra’s wider and enduring project, to which one line from ‘Ma Fleur’ especially relates: ‘Wrap yourself around the world.’ The band’s juxtaposition of ‘cinematic’ and ‘orchestra’ is their self-proclaiming manifesto that the music they make ought to simultaneously conjure or suggest a visual landscape. So tunes have to be kept both relatively impersonal and stridently open: these are neutral compositions for the listener to ‘imaginate upon,’ as Jason explains it. I wonder aloud whether the sometime fine art student and band leader is one of those rare people who experiences synaesthaesia, or ‘colour hearing.’ Can he ever hear a piece of music with a blank canvass in his mind, or listen to a note without his vision becoming awash with a certain hue? ‘I do both, really,’ he says with a mischievous glimmer in his eye. Presumably, to ‘wrap yourself around the world’ is to experience it fully and meaningfully, as a part of nature rather than part of human destiny. Eyes and ears would perceive this integrated universe as one; sights and sounds would work in a symbiotic fashion, while the ego melts away. By reflection, so-called

‘mystical’ experiences that have been reported through time often involve the subject describing being wrapped in light or a flame coloured cloud, whilst hearing enchanting music. And so we return to Jason’s original ambition, to imbue his work with that ‘spiritual’ quality where life adds up, in all of its hectic elements and heady sensations – just like the young protagonist of ‘Ma Fleur,’ we ‘Climb the tree to see the world,’ and are at peace with it.

Legendary ‘Rescue Me’ soul singer Fontella Bass urges the second tune along with her ‘How near / How far / Tell me how far,’ refrain, as Luke Flowers’ drums arrive for the first time, a subtly added texture to the lingering parts of piano and double bass. Jason remembers his stubbornness at the time of producing this track; he was determined not to use any of the same collaborators from 2002’s ‘Everyday,’ but it ‘just wasn’t happening’ with the other vocalists he recruited. At the time, Fontella was very ill, but ‘she wanted to make music, like she always has done, not just sit and

convalesce.’ While Patrick provides the tones of youth, Fontella is the voice

of age and experience, her ‘near’ and ‘far’ seemingly interchangeable with ‘Ma Fleur’’s preoccupation with the themes of love and loss. She sings a melody that tremours and undulates, so that the weight of significance between ‘near’ and ‘far’ shifts, just like the ebb and flow of human relationships both within the universe of the record, and in the real world outside. Jason confirms that the title ‘Ma Fleur’ is indeed indicative of a fragile token passed from one lover to another; a simple language that encodes so much and crystallises a moment to be savoured.

As for the interaction between The Cinematic Orchestra’s individual instrumentalists, Jason felt no pressure to ‘include all of the band in all of the tracks.’ While the celebrated, beat-driven ‘Everyday’ used complex harmonical and rhythmical structures, he believes that ‘things got lost.’ Here, the listener is alive to the suggestiveness of repeated motifs, and

the ‘orchestration between the selected instruments,’ rather than grand, sweeping arrangements, is what resonates and yields energy. Comparable with Jason taking inspiration from raw and spontaneous human action like ‘seeing a couple hugging in the street,’ and Patrick’s lyric: ‘Held on as tightly / As you held onto me,’ it is the intimate movements and exchanges between the instruments that is crucial, not the bombastic effect of a fully fledged

orchestra. So ‘Ma Fleur’ sees the band employing a new technique of ‘taking things away’; the value of understatement that is perhaps an effect of Jason’s immersion in Parisian culture. The contemplative, ‘romantic’ character of

the city is something he acknowledges as an influence upon the record. Becoming uninspired by the music he was making from East London, Jason moved to Paris, where ‘Ma Fleur’ began to take shape. However, the record was completed amid the ‘growth’ of New York, where Jason has now settled.

He found the perfect location to take photographs for the various scenes of ‘Ma Fleur’ along the Rockaway Peninsula in Brooklyn. To compliment the unified vision of the world ‘Ma Fleur’ projects, it was important to find a landscape where all of the scenes could be accommodated, not just random ‘meaningless’ scraps of the city, cemented together to synthesise a whole. A preternaturally blue sky, almost turquoise, envelopes the waterside image on the record’s sleeve, a shadowy hut flanked by bullrushes gesturing towards the central idea of ‘home’ that the opening track meditates upon.

Respected New York photographer Maya Hayuk worked with Jason to shoot eleven images, one for every track. No overt links between the tunes and the photographs are offered, just as ‘Ma Fleur’’s characters are absent or distorted – this audiovisual work had to be kept as open as possible, to bring the universality and interpretative freedom Jason insists his art must have. By extension, the vocal parts on the record had to be sparse and carefully placed. Fourth track, ‘Music Box,’ for example, features the gentle intertwining of Patrick’s voice with Mercury-nominated Lou Rhodes’, their murmuring parts seeping into the composition like spirits, leaving the human world of battling wills and distracting egos behind. Returning to arresting opener ‘To Build A Home,’ Jason stresses the importance of the way in which Patrick’s words and intonation had to be ‘wrapped’ around the music in a manner that was objective enough; unobtrusively, so that the emotion was controlled and contained. The frontman’s choice of ‘wrapped’ is revealing, again harking back to that impassioned lyric, ‘Wrap yourself around the world.’ Clearly ‘wrap’ is the most active verb both within the record and

Jason’s artistic imagination; this imperative to meld opposite elements together, to liquidate a fragmented life of love and loss into a fruitful whole. ‘Joy and pain’ (as Lou sings in the last tune), past and present, ‘near and far’ (Fontella’s verse), self and other, man and nature...Disparate elements are gathered, fused and dispersed by these lush and lilting soundscapes as they roll along. Scenes assemble and mutate while the characters grow, think, feel, act and decay; harmony and discord is their orchestral accompaniment.

Breathe’ is the third to last track: one character’s final and stoic intake of breath as she resigns herself to death, here figured as some kind of oceanic subsuming. While the action and subject of this song is dissolution, Fontella’s vocal is rich, deep, unwavering; the most assured and dominant delivery across the entire record, flanked only by a simple bassline, a hesitant melody and occasional drums. For the spirit of ‘Ma Fleur’ is optimistic, its dynamic an upward thrust. Although Jason reckons that ‘Everyday’ was ‘closer to motion,’ he also tells me that ‘physics’ are a meaningful part of this fresh material – the bodily vibrations elicited by various instruments and voices that demand a visceral response from

us. The interplay between our auditory and visual faculties are then to do with the neurophysiology of the brain, and nowhere on ‘Ma Fleur’ is this synaesthesia more alive than with Fontella’s perishing figure on ‘Ma Fleur.’

She tells of some mysterious force ‘singing into me’; ‘It comforts me / And carries me / Out to sea / And swallows me.’ At ‘swallows’ the music builds dramatically then falls away to usher in ethereal backing vocals: the benevolent god that has been presiding over the record seems to be guiding her into another life cycle. Such renewal and continuity – the visual image of waves gathering, crashing and reforming endures – is carried forward by the penultimate and final tracks. Patrick revisits the melody with which he opened the record, then Lou instructs us to ‘Dream’ over burgeoning strings and glockenspiel. The bonds between these disparate individuals allow life to remain unfolding meaningfully.

Forward-looking, sincere and physical, cerebral and spiritual at once, ‘Ma Fleur’ is one of those records that is built around a belief in the power and magic of music. By working to unite the impulses of past and present, the perceptions of eye and ear and the preoccupations of self and other, Jason and his Cinematic Orchestra invite listeners to hear their own hopeful message and see external beauties afresh. ‘H(o)ld on as tightly’ to this record as you do to your own selfhood or a beloved other, and you might just relearn the wonder of what it is to ‘wrap yourself around the world.’

‘MA FLEUR’ IS OUT NOW (NINJA TUNE)