Autres Directions In Music :: MP3 Label Profile

Melodium’s Parthenay EP is built around happy memories. The melody on the first
track, “Ichtio,” has been salvaged from the very first keyboard that Laurent Girard
ever had. Parthenay is the name of a town where he grew up and he always liked the
sound of the name. The core of Parthenay is “the sounds you like,” in this case,
they are all fragments of melodies half-remembered from childhood. Lo-Fi in a
glorious disturbed radio signal way, the eight tracks of Parthenay wheeze like
expired air from old wooden instruments and sigh with the wistful innocence of our
infancies. A piano teeters back and forth throughout “Pluraple” while tiny glitch
elements dance around the looped melody like motes of dust caught in the summer
sunlight. “Ichtio” begins with the sine wave of shortwave signal while Morse code
is tapped out by tiny mouse paws. The rhythms of “Ichtio” are but one step removed
from water splashing out of a full basin and bring up a range of forgotten memories
about the uncomplicated joy of splashing in the tub as a young boy.

Dudley and Depth Affect provide two remixes and, in both cases, the remixers don’t
bother much with the original tracks but bring their own style of electronic lo-fi
to the mix as accompaniment to tiny elements salvaged from the original. In
Dudley’s case, he builds a dusty guitar loop and slathers it with his own drones and
tiny particles of sound. Depth Affect used “Terminus” as texture and melody to
their CloudEAD style of hip-hop. But they can’t quite manage to completely divest
the music of Melodium’s innocent jingle-jangle. Melodium wraps up the EP with
“Mmiomm” (remixed earlier by Dudley), a piece for chirping static, the endless inner
groove of a 12″ record, and an old organ which one preset left: ice cream social
church organ. Melodium’s electronic glitch-innocence is a tiny slice of digitally
transcribed childhood.

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Dudley :: Seasonal LP (MP3)

Dudley’s Seasonal LP is nine homemade songs composed while sitting in the living
room with acoustic guitar, effects box, and an open window to the city street below. Dudley’s tracks flow with a laconic rhythm, a laid-back expression of indifference
to the bustle of vehicles and people on the street below. Dudley is the
street-corner musician who seems content to just pick at a melody all day.
“Adequat” is a tiny duet between the feeble wails of a theremin and an acoustic
guitar that has a tendency to slip sharp on some of its notes. It’s a petite pop
song, sans any lyrical distraction, and it sets the fanciful tone of the record.

The “recorded at home” characterization extends to the instrumentation: the
percussion on “Little Whirl” sounds like it is nothing more chopsticks rattling on a
several different sizes of pots; the metallic patter of “Let-Down” is from the
kitchen again, an echo straight off the side of a biscuit tin. It’s a DIY ethic
which lends a facile air to the music and makes them uncomplicated constructs that
take up residence in the jubilant portion of your brain.

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Depth Affect :: Mesquin EP (MP3)

Depth Affect’s four-track EP, Mesquin, is nearly twenty minutes of shuffling
electronic hip-hop with the MCs lost beneath the rattle and shuffle of the music.
Meant as a taster for their full-length demo record, Mesquin Eye, this EP is
intended to give Rémy Charrier and David Bideau — the duo behind the decks
and mics — “the opportunity to avoid any kind of venal processes and to broadcast
our titles on a relatively important scale.” The lads blend a healthy love of the
phat hip-hop sound with tiny particles and electronic melodies like those wrung out
of kid’s toys, making hip-hop that is as winsome as a spring day, unencumbered with
all the worry of bitches and bling.

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Harpagès :: Simples Visions (MP3)

The duo of Julien and Antoine Harpagès offer a single track for their EP, a
twenty-eight minute sprawl of tiny noise and shifting micro-elements. You have to
wait for something to happen, you have to want something to happen, as the opening
minutes creeps by with such slight sounds that you might think there is a mouse in
the wall, working its teeth against the edge of a plastic-wrapped cracker. Beats
creep in eventually, stirring up the tiny particles as if a Pan Sonic show were
happening several floors beneath you.

“Simple Visions” is a perambulation through distaff genres. After dwelling in the
microtone and rumbling through the basso ambient, the duo wander into the acoustic
guitar soundscape, allowing the previous glitches and rumbles to drain away beneath
a the slow modulation of a finger-picked melody. Which, somewhere around the
halfway mark of the track, turns into a shimmering cascade of bell tones and
swooping notes like a sea of crystal whales tuning up for a long nocturnal concert
to accompany the Northern Lights. After the introduction of these diverse elements,
the pair begin to merge everything together, building unstable foundations which
crumble after too little time and too few notes. “Simple Visions” ends with the
scaling clatter of glitch signals, digital detritus that has been strew in our path.

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Dirge :: Fountain EP (MP3)

Slow guitar, elegiac cello, and gentle drum kit propel the five tracks on Dirge’s
Fountain EP. These are mournful laments rising straight out of the band’s name,
slowcore pastorals of a region where time moves more slowly than the glittering
city. Reminiscent of Low and a minimalesque Radiohead, “Hidden Track” evolves
slowly from a simple drum pattern to a more grandiose lamentation with Yann
Lafosse’s voice rising around the long tones of Mirjam Tauz’s warm cello.

These are songs built around moments of time, tiny slices of life set to song.
“Phone” is built around a dial tone loop, an awkward message left on the answering
machine, and the subsequent distress of half-remembered events from a Christmas
party. In “Lois,” Benjamin Daubeuf’s soft brushwork on the snare and Yann’s drowsy
guitar work unwind around a series of ruminations on their friend Lois’ exclamation
of “I’ve got a strange silence in my head” following a night of heavy drinking.

Probably the most indie rock of the releases on Autres Directions to this point,
Dirge’s Fountain EP demonstrates that the label isn’t constricting itself with any
one, well, direction. “The world turns ’round / You lift me up.” Yann sings on the
final track of the Fountain EP, “Sympathetic Bar.” Indeed, it does seem to all be
about trying to touch the responsive muscle of your heart.

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Atone :: Un Jour EP (MP3)

The five tracks of Atone’s Un Jour EP were originally intended for a live
performance, a setting where machines and a melodica could fill a room with delicate
cascades of light beats and the reverberating echoes of the wind-blown keyboard.
When that solution failed to properly materialize, Antoine Monzonis-Calvet let the
tracks lay fallow until the fall when she returned to them with an eye for studio
production. New juxtapositions arose during the overdubs and she found the tracks
sang with a greater gravitas and honesty.

“Partir” and “Two Marimbas” are flooded with the electronic equivalent of bubbling
water as if an artesian spring provides all of the rhythm and percussive movement.
Monzonis-Calvet’s melodica plays counterpoint to the effervescent beats like an 19th
century salon player competing with an endless flow of champagne being poured in the
next room.

“Balneaire” is a piece of twilight ambience, filled with a tiny spray of machine
noise and brittle drum machine beats. “C’est fini” is born from a squirt of speaker
static, a captured bleat of a wireless transmission that blossoms into a complex
collaboration between bell tones and scattered drum patterns. Her final track,
“Qobac Sine,” is thick with reverb as the melodica sings out a slow cinematic
lament, its round tones chased with tiny shards of synthesizer notes like young
ducks after their mother.

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Propergol y Colargol :: Charly Roger, Songs For Fuzzycandy LP (MP3)

Attempting to mimic some of the aesthetic of Organisation (Kraftwerk’s first band)
and a sensation of complete immersion, Propergol and Colargol have embarked on an
ambition journey of cyclical themes and repetitive structures with Charly.Roger
(songs for fuzzycandy), their LP length release for Autres Directions. The tracks
are hypnotic meditative experiences with icy taction — songs which lower your alpha
waves while simaultaneously preserving your brain in a cyrogenic state.

While “No Particular Destination” whirlpools itself in a ritualized circle, its
crackling tones endlessly cycling about a fixed point, “Il Covo Club” shivers with
static menace and its repetitive melody is a trapped phrase struggling against a
lone drone and the persistent hiss of damaged machinery. “Auntie Annies” swells
with the radio-damaged transmission of a lonely harpsichord while minimal techno
beats caper about with reckless abandon.

“Ass.music.etna.zo Club” rumbles into the speakers like a whirling cyclotron, its
melody hidden behind the rhythmic flutter of the machine’s blades. It grows into a
strange growling alien soundtrack as if Martian composers were scoring a print of
Westworld to their foreign instruments. “Cafe Trauma” crackles with noise as if the
old radio on the shelf above the worn bar is receiving a cascade of solar flares,
hydrogen noise transformed into the whispering whistle of radio static.

“Forum Stadpark” is a surprisingly gentle and winsome tune, full of ringing chimes
and soft shuffling percussion gamboling about a long-form wave tone. “22” winds
itself up over the course of four minutes like a fuzz guitar intro to a cinematic
dust storm across a western state. While more emotional uptempo than some of the
other tracks on Charly.Roger, these tracks are still excursions in long cycles, slow
evolutions of phase shift and minimal changes in melodic structure. And, while
“Hitchhincking Nonstop” blooms with gentle guitar work, there are still shards of
frigid tones which ring like slow melting drops of winter ice.

While the argument for Charly.Roger (songs for fuzzycandy) is the immersion of the
listener into a fully digital environment — a isolation world of tones and bleeps
— there are still emotional glitches in this system. Strange little sensations of
feeling rise up in the listener as their minds aren’t completely done away with
human emotions. You can fall in to find nothingness, but you’ll wind up finding a
little bit about yourself as well.

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V/A :: The Noise and the City 2xLP (MP3)

The most ambitious project of the label to date is The Noise and the City release,
two hours of processed field recordings pulled from around the world. Artists were
asked to record some of their local ambience, to just grab a microphone and catch a
slice of their local cityscape, tweak it as much as they liked without adding any
rhythm or music and submit it to the project. There are thirty tracks here, thirty
submissions of noise in the city, and while some cleave closely to their recorded
sources, others take off, disappearing into imaginary landscapes.

Autres Directions labelmates Depth Affect and Propergol y Colgargol deliver caustic
eructations of the city where “Vulcanor” sounds like seismic movement of magma as
heard through the manhole grates of the city and “Keres-Jauravel” is a grating,
ticking slab of noise that sounds like it was recorded through a contact mic
attached directly to the back of an old clock. Meldoium’s “Feletone” closes out the
collection with a piece that sounds like the collected noises of a city’s clockwork
mechanisms, the collated and compressed tick, whirr, buzz, clack-clack of every
timepiece of the city’s architecture.

Stendec manages to turn a field recording of traffic and pedestrians rushing
through their daily routine, called appropriately enough “Office To Studio,” into a
full on downtempo minimal techno track complete with soft-shoe shuffle, turntable
scratch, and delicate melody. randomNumber’s “Be Honest…” is a slow fade-out, a
static pulse that wraps itself around the slow heartbeat of 4:00 A.M. By the time a
woodwind whispers in, the only thing on this desolate street is the wind playing
with an old newspaper. Galaktlan’s “Walking Home in Tallinn” is a nocturnal stroll
(albeit a rapidly paced one) through mist-shrouded streets where the lights are
floating will-o-the-wisps.

Teamforest’s “Of Places I Know; Of Houses I Never Entered” is reminiscent of Wilt’s
work with gritty dark ambience shot through with the cut-up sound of an ancient
record, fragmented voices heard in a hallway, and the metallic banging of the pipes
in the next room. It’s an exceptionally claustrophobic slice of inner city life.
Novel 23’s “Try to Be on Time” begins on a summer day in the park with lots and lots
of happy birds and gets sucked down a sewer grate somewhere to the drowning pool
beneath the local sanitarium where all the screams of the dying seem to have gone.

Montano turns a damaged cut-up of voices into a watery downtempo track, echoes
elongated into liquid melody against a dubbed out rhythm section. Robokoneko’s
“Brume” is reminiscent of Boards of Canada style electronic innocence with its
sprightly springtime melody. e*rock’s “Streetdub” is a piece of chamber music for
traffic light, steam grate, car horn and a woodwind section of small birds.

Aquaboogie mixes children’s voices, groaning machinery, and a thick field recording
straight off the docks into a dense and immersive piece. “Queens Birthday” is one of
my favorites from this collection, and Pan*American’s “Outside” uses a ship’s bell
and creak of old rigging as well to evoke a fog-shrouded harbor at the cold break of
day. Mitchell Akiyama weaves two days together with “May 15, Marche Jean-Talon June
15, Rue de Chateaubriand,” creating a hyperkinetic travelogue of movement and street
side ambience. Fibla evokes the sweltering heat of the summer and the lazy movement
of the street with “Can Barca,” a smooth static-charged piece that is equal parts
pooled sweat and heat waves rising off melting pavement.

I don’t hear anything here that immediately makes me think of an particular city or
place (although the web site is kind enough to list the source of each artist’s
submission). The tracks have all been tweaked enough that the harmonic of city life
is resonant on a higher level than my simple tourist experience can manage. It does
make me want to travel because if this is what the world sounds like, I definitely
don’t get out enough.

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Addendum ::

Depth Affect and Melodium are working on official CD releases for AD. Alias from the Anticon crew will sing on the Depth Affect album and Melodium’s release will include participations from Dudley. In the future AD
will alternate material and unmaterial releases, using unmaterial releases as a
promotional tool for material releases. Melodium has recently released his fourth album for Portland, Oregon’s Audiodregs label. Atone’s “Qobac Sine” (featured on Un Jour EP) will be published on the fourth edition of Neo Ouija’s Cottage Industries compilation series.

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