zakè :: B⁴+3 (Zakè Drone), zakè & Benoît Pioulard :: eve (Past Inside The Present)

Double review for zakè’s B⁴+3 (Zakè Drone) and zakè & Benoît Pioulard’s eve (Past Inside The Present)—proceeding to windblown drones and bells tintinnabulating across the sound field.

Ambient expanses of cadence and cascade, cosmic and chthonic

So, B⁴, audio accompaniment to a set of art prints, had left zakè with a sense of ‘unfinished business,’ of works left in a ‘purgatory state.’ B⁴+3, then, seeks to resolve that state with a remake-remodel from the Ambient Dronemeister of the original eponymous 4, adding 3 new. B for Big, perhaps, as in sky. A series of ambient expanses of cadence and cascade, cosmic and chthonic, or ‘monochrome drone for the gray days we see more often than we wish,’ if you will, though Zach Frizzell’s self-deprecatingly prosaic characterization of his work is misleading; your scribe would go for a more vivid analogy—with Rothko and pointillist painting, at once broad swathes of tone color and Brownian motion bristling with particulate detail. The bookending “Bracken” and “Barren” usher us in, and eventually see us out, swathes and swells, pillows and billows, in a caliginous-luminous crossover. Through “Betrayal,” “Burnt” and “Banded” we pass from level to level, portal to portal, ever deeper apertures to… you decide. “Blight” brings distant thunder, low-end pressure mounting, before “Bane” billows from below, ever more ineffable.

Long gone it may be, but lest we forget or perhaps missed out, a gift from Frizzell’s other home, Past Inside the Present, came last Christmas/New Year in the form of (eponymous?) eve, first full-length drone-mance for zakè with Benoît Pioulard. An archive of sound refound, based on a decade’s fragments and offcuts capturing snow-flecked spectral swells and swirls suggestive of celebration—a vespertine scene with signifiers of peace passingly presented in glacial hush with vaporous exhalations. A decade of recoveries, crafted by zakè into substructures for each section, then sculpted into harmonic strata, to which Pioulard added various orchestrations of tape-processed guitar, voice, dulcimer, melodica and synth. A fine balance emerges between each artist’s timbral idiolect in nigh on an hour of choreographed slo-mo unfurling. Stepping into a wintry night, a Big Still prevails, oneiric, with “frost” setting in on Pioulard’s vocal wisps, proceeding to windblown drones and bells tintinnabulating across the sound field through its glacial remainder, building into iridescent ‘scapes; ending as the uncanny mix of blithe and mysterious, glow and gloaming that is “pine,” with its sylvan-slivered underlay of dulcimer and reedy susurrations, finally cedes to a few moments of dead calm.

B⁴+3 and eve are available via Zakè Drone Recordings and Past Inside the Present.