Titled Les allées tourbillonnaires, this new release is a shadowy and immersive exploration of sound motifs and sonic details extracted from environmental noises and green-field recordings.
Echoing, clashing noises are subtly covered by a vast array of microsounds
After a first convincing collaborative effort for Lotophagus Records, published earlier this year, the duo Julien Ash & Philippe Neau is back with new sonic sound sculptures and electro-acoustic experimentations to ravish your ears. This time, they find a space to deliver their new body of aural soundscapes thanks to Mahorka Records (active for many years in the field of uncompromising electronic music with an experimental edge).
Julien Ash has been active for decades, following his own stylistic path without paying much attention to genres and categories, with a radical approach that oscillates between pure avant-garde, post-industrial bleakness, and handcrafted semi-classical pieces. Philippe Neau‘s creative signature is intentionally plural, navigating both audio and visual fields, attentive to psychoacoustic effects on the listener and with a clear interest in sound painting.
Titled Les allées tourbillonnaires, this new release is a shadowy and immersive exploration of sound motifs and sonic details extracted from environmental noises and green-field recordings. The organic timbres melt into a vast vacuum of resonating percussive/metallic interferences, punctuated by aerial-ethereal droney vibes that reinforce the mysterious nature of this sentient experience. The strength of this album lies in the shifting, subterranean, moody-esque, impressionistic spell that flows continuously throughout the tracks. In itself, the music here is quite deconstructive and delicately evolves across explorative territories without being harsh or too difficult on the ears. There is almost a meditative, eroded, mantra-like impact that rises to the surface and can easily enthrall our capacity for listening. Echoing, clashing noises are subtly covered by a vast array of microsounds and meandering, buzzed-out textures, as in the eloquent “Croisements modulaires.” Long, dreary, altered, and evanescent acoustic chords also resonate in a vast grey field of natural sounds and ghostly reverbed motifs, as in the quite superb “Flux entrant in la mineur”.
For fans of conceptual music, poetical hypnagogia, micronoises, and process music. If you are into the multidimensional, ambient-esque experimentations of Savvas Metaxas, Marja Hati, and Andrew Anderson, as well as the work of the latest generation of innovative sound makers, or Nurse With Wound and Andrew Liles for fragmented sound collages and transfigurative psychic drones, you won’t be disconcerted.
Les allées tourbillonnaires is available on Mahorka. [Bandcamp]
