This album length extended player has the narrative flow of free-standing but interlocking short stories with more sense of place than state of mind.
Limiting his parameters to three pieces of modular analogue equipment, Antwerp-based Yves De Mey conducts a short series of successful rhythmic experiments. De May’s background is in sound design, scoring film, installations and the performing arts, and this album length extended player has the narrative flow of free-standing but interlocking short stories with more sense of place than state of mind.
Frisson—a sudden, strong feeling of excitement, a thrill—is certainly le mot juste, for the opening, title track is a shuddering, transportive ten-minute snake-charmer blues. Really one of the year’s most entrancing tracks. “Empty Prints” is the waking of red badland ridges gradually catching the rays of the morning sun, evaporating the night frost. “Cadence” maintains perfect equilibrium whilst it oscillates and twirls at the same time, until “Phoresis” drains the last out of his machines before they need recharging.
The final of his five originals, a rubber-band steam engine called “Isorhythmia,” is appended with a “Spring Pressure” remix by Miles Whittaker of Demdike Stare, who puts those perfectly spaced rhythms into an oil drum, rolls it around, and lets entropy go to work on them, while Peter Van Hoesen, De May’s partner in Sendai and in this new label, takes them on a far smoother ride on his “Rough Dub.”
Frisson is available on Archives Intérieures.
