“You don’t even have to “enter” Toma Gouband’s music, our ears (and eyes, when we have the pleasure of seeing him at work) are naturally invited by the spectacular and unheard-of arrangements of tonal colors that make up his dreamy and inventive universe: flints, natural skins of a horizontal bass drum sprinkled with little bells or blocks of wood, branches and twigs, stones rolled on the ground, inverted cymbals thus collecting all sorts of natural resonators… the hi-hat cymbals have been replaced by… stones, too…

Animated by an inner pulse made of superpositions of mysterious cycles, like so many clocks telling the time of life at poly-speed, which overlap or collide, Toma Gouband’s music transcends the idea of an imaginary territory, because it invites us to approach it like a social rite or even a loving ceremony. A masterful weaving of sound fabrics that we feel are universal, from an ancient, even prehistoric age, but also from an era to come or to become, whose visual metaphor could be those traditional Kuba fabrics from Upper-Zaire made of cloths sewn one on top of the other, to which animated patterns are added, driven by rigorous arrangements but whose craftsmanship seems to obey rules transmitted only to the initiated.

This is music initiated by the history of the world, therefore, unique, free from any sectarian constraint, and which responds only to its inner strength—a peak of musical art..” Benoit Delbecq