There is always a risk, with records that speak of “ritual” and “spirit instruments”, that they collapse under the weight of their own vocabulary. Incense without fire. Fortunately, maninkari seem largely uninterested in explaining themselves, which already improves the situation.

"L’océan rêve dans sa loisiveté – Fourth session", released by Rope Worm, continues the duo’s long-standing exploration of sound as a kind of slow, interior architecture. The project, led by Olivier and Frédéric (names that feel almost deliberately understated given the music’s ambitions), operates in that ambiguous territory where composition and improvisation stop arguing and start cohabiting uneasily.

The instrumentation alone suggests a certain refusal of convenience: viola, cello, cymbalum, frame drums, wind elements. Nothing here is designed for immediacy. Sustained tones dominate, often circling minor tonalities that never quite resolve, as if resolution itself were a vulgarity best avoided. The result is a sound that doesn’t progress so much as accumulate, layer by patient layer.

The shorter pieces - those cryptically titled fragments like "[-v-] 33" or "[-v-] 34" - function almost like apertures. Brief openings where textures shift, where the ear recalibrates before being drawn back into denser terrain. Then come the longer stretches, particularly "[-v-] 36", where time begins to loosen its grip. Not in a dramatic, cinematic way, but more like a quiet erosion. You stop counting minutes. You start noticing weight, resonance, decay.

There’s a persistent sense of circular motion throughout the album. Not loops in the electronic sense, but gestures that return, slightly altered, as if the music were thinking its way through itself. The cymbalum, in particular, adds a brittle luminosity, a kind of metallic shimmer that hovers above the darker drone of strings and percussion. It’s beautiful, though not in any immediately comforting way.

What distinguishes this “fourth session” from becoming mere ambient drift is its tension. Beneath the meditative surface, there is friction. Bow against string, skin against drum, breath against air. The music resists dissolving into background. It insists, quietly but persistently, on being listened to.

Conceptually, the album leans toward a kind of anti-modern stance: a retreat from the hyper-articulated, over-mediated present into something slower, more tactile. And yet, it never feels nostalgic. There’s no attempt to reconstruct a lost past. Instead, it builds a parallel space where time behaves differently, where attention is not constantly fragmented.

The phrase “the mortality of fire by the rational ego” (one of those lines that sounds either profound or slightly unhinged depending on your mood) actually fits better than expected. There is a sense here of something being subdued, contained, not extinguished but held at a lower intensity. A controlled burn, if you prefer less poetic language.

In the end, "L’océan rêve dans sa loisiveté – Fourth session" is less about transcendence than about duration. About staying within a sound long enough for it to reveal its internal weather. It doesn’t guide you anywhere. It simply opens a space and waits.

Which, in a world addicted to acceleration, feels almost suspiciously patient.