Snowdrops - Volutes review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

The Guardian 80

(Injazero Records)
Performing on the eerie ondes Martenot alongside strings and piano, Christine Ott takes us deep into the uncanny valley

While working as a radio operator during the first world war, Maurice Martenot became fascinated by the pure sine waves that were accidentally produced by radio oscillators – the stray noises that he heard when trying to find a signal. Martenot, a trained cellist, researched ways of manipulating these faulty signals and, after the war, started building his own instrument. By 1928 he had created the ondes Martenot, a bizarre proto-synth where the pitch of several radio oscillators is controlled by moving the right hand over an electrical ribbon, while the timbre is manipulated by operating a touch-sensitive “lozenge” with the left hand. The instrument’s ghostly, frictionless sound proved popular with a host of composers, including Messiaen, Boulez, Varèse and – latterly – Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, as well as becoming a fixture of horror-movie soundtracks.

Strasbourg-based pianist Christine Ott is one of the world’s foremost exponents of this curious instrument. After playing it in Yann Tiersen’s band for a while, she recently released Chimères, a dark and haunting album of electronica recorded using multi-tracked ondes Martenots. Snowdrops is her electro-acoustic duo with Mathieu Gabry, and their latest album Volutes puts Ott’s ondes alongside violin, cello, piano, Mellotron and the viola of Anne Irène-Kempf.

Volutes is released on 16 October on Injazero Records.