Aries Mond is based in the south of France (in the Pyrénées Mountains), and the French musician’s Come On Let’s Wait is an invitation into the area’s deep stillness and perpetual pause. Things seem to slow down when the piano plays, with only a breath of fresh, warmer air stirring through the peaks. The Indian summer of 2016 brushed through the autumn months, prevailing for a much longer period and eventually occupying much of the winter in what was an odd fluke of nature, and this is where the album was born; that off-coloured season is explored here.
The piano breathes out a cloud of fresh air. Repetitions and cool, scarf-hidden rhythms merge with a warmer piano that occasionally glitches, resembling a bug in the system as well as in the general climate. The loop can last for minutes at a time when it becomes stuck, which is very much in keeping with a spell of obdurate weather. When silver clouds are glued to the skyline, what else is there to do but wait for them to clear, be it minutes…hours…days…months. The music surrenders to its surreal atmosphere, understanding and accepting of its inability to change things. So it adapts to the warmer conditions, waiting, playing.
Time seems to take a breather – taking a literal time-out – in come on let’s wait. And waiting is difficult sometimes. It can be punishing, confusing, especially in the blurred-speeds of life in the twenty-first century. “I want it all and I want it now” isn’t just a song lyric to a rock classic but a modern mantra, and this kind of impatience has grown with the advent of on-demand services, satiating our supposed needs for instant gratification. But it wasn’t always a deep-seated need, and we weren’t always wired to think like that. We learn it, somewhere along the way.
There’s plenty of time to stop and admire the view – in fact, a deeper experience of all things is on offer. When the piano starts to loop a sequence, the music goes even deeper, scoping in on ant-like details before zooming back out to the wider picture. The music appears to be stuck when it’s looping, and it’s natural to think there’s not much development in the repetition, but there’s much more going on as the loop continues to orbit, drawing the listener inside a whirlpool out of time. The music reflects the strange weather as its notes are out of sorts, suddenly repeating and then stuttering on, progressing into quieter fields before ending in silence.