OR gives the ears a thorough pummeling across its eleven relentless bass-music tone-poems, interrupted only briefly by morsels of polished ambience or skewed and bent android like voices. Like most Raster-Noton releases, you’ll need to concentrate on OR to get the most out of it, otherwise it becomes a rather homogeneous smear.
[Raster-Noton Shop] It always comes as something of a relief when a release by the likes of Senking, Byetone or Kangding Ray is announced as part of the Raster-Noton schedule for the year as their take on minimalist IDM is a refreshing counterpoint to some of the earnest and occasionally pretentious stuff the label is known for putting out. Anyone for seventy minutes of what sounds like Sonic the Hedgehog stuck between two bumpers? How about an entire album of looped words or phrases accompanied by someone blankly reading out the contents of old receipts and other document miscellany? No? No-one? Thought not.
David Letellier’s previous releases on the label were comparatively free of such baggage: Stabil presented familiar, though still pleasingly minimal and meticulous electronic arrangements, whilst Automne Fold embraced thick fuzz, hazy, almost dreamlike atmospheres and even poetry. It seems, however, that OR isn’t entirely immune from having some sort of concept or political background, the title apparently a reference to today’s obsession with consumerism and the stock market, upon which gold (chemical symbol Or in French) remains the one commodity to retain and/or increase in value in a downward spiralling economic climate. And yet and the same time it’s also a reference to the logical operator. Okay. Also epitomising corporate excess is the typically minimalist design of OR‘s sleeve artwork, counterpointed by a massively over the top debossed, gold foil blocked front cover.
Somewhere between Automne Fold and OR bleak turned to blank as emotion and nostalgia were stripped away and discarded. Gone are the blurred and felted edges, snow powdered effects and pinches of acoustic instrumentation, replaced by clinical accuracy and business-like efficiency. Every facet of this album is stamped, signed in triplicate and delivered with laser etched precision. Stainless steel beats propel waves of stinging but carefully controlled distortion through cavernous halls and austere corporate receptions.
“Athem” is an exceptionally strong opener, as almost obsessive attention to reverb levels on the clangs, thuds and bass-lines create a sense of vastness and spaciousness that is quite extraordinary from such a sparsely populated piece. The sheets of digital rain in “Mojave” are penetrated by an onslaught of vast, thundering juggernauts cleaving the air with full beam headlights. The driving momentum and frost-fire core of “Odd Sympathy” more strongly recalls Automne Fold whilst “Coracoid Process” is both tense and gritty featuring percussive chitin scrapes and sine-wave fly-by aircraft drones. The steaming chasms of boiling bass that churn underneath the clatter and rattle of the title track was used to promote the album, accompanied by a beautifully choreographed (Jean-Baptiste André) and directed (Nicolas Lelièvre) slow-motion video, a perfect accompaniment to the oddly time-stretched growl and fuzz of the piece. “En Amaryllis Jour” lunges in bursts of searing static before more ultrabass tones assault the eardrums. The rusty hinge pulses of “La Belle” come right out of left-field and mark OR‘s most evocative, human moment, though it builds to a pulsing, buzzing crescendo.
OR gives the ears a thorough pummeling across its eleven relentless bass-music tone-poems, interrupted only briefly by morsels of polished ambience or skewed and bent android like voices. Like most Raster-Noton releases, you’ll need to concentrate on OR to get the most out of it, otherwise it becomes a rather homogeneous smear. Similarly, to get most out of the precision production values you’re going to need some decent audiophile gear, otherwise the whole thing can sound unpleasantly muddy and crushed. Nevertheless, OR is easily one of the finest and most accessible Raster-Noton releases of 2011.
OR is out now on Raster-Noton. [Raster-Noton Shop]
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