There is a cinematic science fiction feel to Ab Ovo’s Le Temps Suspendu…, a whirling soundtrack that creates a sustained vision of otherworldly landscapes, exploding space gases, and expanding tunnels and portals of fractured light. A much calmer record that one would expect from Ant-Zen (thereby continuing to confound our expectations of what the label is capable of), Le Temps Suspendu… is very much a record built for headphones and late night solitary listening. Much like the title implies, you can lose yourself in this record and vanish from the time stream of the present.
Oceans of sound ebb and flow over field recordings of birds and captured fragments of soft conversation. Space noises whoosh and glide like tunnels of celestial lights. “Moments,” the opener of this double CD set, begins with a soft ambience and gradually covers it with a textured layer of claustrophobic radio voices and percolating beats. Noises like rats in the walls skitter in and out of the mix. This sense of unease permeates all of the tracks, a creeping unrest which skews the material out of Brian Eno ambience into David Lynch territory. They capture that same disquiet which punctuates much of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Volume 2. “Ascendance” opens with bird song and a golden ambient tone that stretches across the sky. As you listen to it, the sound begins to fray, its brittleness beginning to show. And, as the melody rises like a distant air raid siren, static and back-masking noises have started to drown out the golden tone. The dream into which you’ve fallen has become tinged with the frantic crimson tint of your racing heartbeat.
Chassangard and Baillet have been working together as Ab Ovo for over a decade now and Le Temps Suspendu… is their fourth record (their first for Ant-Zen). The second CD is a collection of remixes, other artists applying their templates to Ab Ovo material from both the past and present (that suspension of time theme again), and, surprisingly, the remixes tend to stay fairly consistent with the ambience with edge motif to which the first disc adheres (while a few wander into noisier and more beat-heavy territory, no one will really get hurt).
The more you consider the possibilities of the alien, the otherworld and the spooky, the more these types of phenomena will manifest themselves around you, and the liminal moment of sleep at which Ab Ovo dances teems with all sorts of spectral possibilities. As you descend into their work, the terrain gets murkier and strange creatures begin to rise to the surface. Le Temps Suspendu… is a gentle record that sneaks up on you. Excellent.
Le Temps Suspendu… is out now on Ant-Zen Records.
