Eve Beuvens: Lysis

It is often said that music begins when poetry ends. But it might be more accurate to suggest that each expresses something the other cannot. For Belgian pianist Eve Beuvens the boundaries between poetry and music are amorphous—each inspiring the other. With Lysis—a biological term describing the breakdown of a cell membrane—music and words bleed into each other. Two poems by Robert Frost, and one each by Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay, provide the starting points from which Beuvens, vocalist Lynn Cassiers and double bassist Lennart Heyndels embark on a personal sonic journey.

Both Cassiers and Heyndels double on electronics. Their ambient bleeps, static hum and crackle are a near constant presence, operating either subliminally or with more assertive atmospheric weight. Coupled with Cassiers' often dreamy delivery, the overall effect is ethereal music that flirts with abstraction. Beuvens' repeating motifs and circular patterns, and Heyndels' spare, lyrical bass provide rhythmic ballast.

With the exception of Dickinson's allegorical "Hope Is the Thing With Feathers," the poems are fairly literal in content and vivid in imagery—making the contrast with the ambient, sometimes ghostly music all the more striking. Cassiers' delivery on Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" is so phantasmal as to render the words indistinct, which makes the absence of lyrics in the otherwise attractive CD case seem like a minor misstep. Her diction, by contrast, is crystal clear on the witty "Inventory," and on the aforementioned "Hope... ," where the music swells from sci-fi-esque electronic rumblings to something grandly foreboding, with Beuvens staccato pianism central to the dynamics of darkness and light.

Threaded between the musical adaptations of these poems are five non-lyrical compositions—two penned by Beuvens, and three co-authored. "Electrolyzed," with its quietly churning electronics and minimalist piano, and "Acidified," a fleeting tableau of bass motif and wordless vocals, are curiously brief affairs—akin to musical haikus. Meatier, and more satisfying, is the episodic "Gleis Fünf," where piano, voice and bass converge as one in ascending-descending lines before splintering. Likewise, the leader's agile right-and-left-hand exchanges on "Ionized," over woozy electronics and earthy bass, raise the collective bar.

When the last note fades, the lingering sensations reside principally in the poetry—sung and spoken—and in their atmospheric framing. In a sense, Frost, Dickinson, Parker and Millay are the stars of the show, and a couple more of their poems might have made for a more conceptually cohesive offering. Still, Beuvens' intimate, artful renditions invite meditation on the world around us and the one within—perhaps chiming with those who seek sense from senselessness and order from chaos.