ORIGINAL SPIRIT by LES HALLES

"“I was admitted to Son Llàtzer Hospital in Mallorca on October 1, 2024, following a
psychotic shock”.

This could well have been the opening sentence of a confessional novel but it’s not. It’s
the first line of an email, which landed in my mailbox seemingly out of nowhere. The
words were written by Baptiste Martin, the composer behind Les Halles.
In his letter, sent as a pdf document, Baptiste offered his friends a concise but striking
report on his whereabouts from the past months. In brief, Baptiste was lost, found, lost and
found again, yet seemingly forever confined to the walls of his cerebral interior. The letter
describes a loss of grip and self-control, like a baby water turtle trying to hoist his way out
of the fish tank by scratching the glass walls, without any result.
Baptiste is a musician and not a writer. His opening line is thus followed by an album,
not a novel. This is the album. Yet, ‘Original Spirit’ doesn’t tell the story of his psychotic
shock as a lineair nonfiction, it offers a vague resolution to all the mischief in life: the hope
for the existence of an original spirit, untainted despite all that might happen during the
course of a life.

The album provokes images of what I would perceive as indeed an original spirit of
oneself: an abstract nothingness breezing through landscapes of colours, searching for
places beyond the boundaries of what we call freedom in the material world. A stream of
sound, nostalgic to a time that never existed, a mystical loophole that we know isn’t there
yet still crave for. In short: the sound of an uncannily serene feeling beyond hope."