Tresor de la Langue has to be one of one of the truly great projects of the last half-century and is (therefore) a very hard act to follow. But on this quietly revolutionary record Rene has found his way to a music that can fairly be described as new; new enough to make it hard to explain, even though it’s easy enough to listen to. For the majority of the pieces here Rene has dispensed with obvious overall form and traditional compositional logic and replaced them with patterns of events; there’s no ABC, no development, no thematic integration, instead we have a kind of experiential logic, a road you share with Rene that’s poly-stylistic, unpredictable, stabilised with rhythms and harmonies when you need them and populated with sounds that exist autonomously, sometimes aren’t obviously connected and often seem to have ben flow in from somewhere else – all tightly bound into something like what Stockhausen called moment form.. with space. Recognised instruments are used, especially electric guitars, contrabass and Daxophone, as well as a host of non-instruments and invented instruments, combined to construct Webern-like orchestral distributions of sounds. Of the seven compositions featured, five probe deeply into the klangfarbenmelodie / event-nexus mode described above; of the other two, one is a tour de force for guitars, electric toothbrushes and snatches of conversation, the other (and the oldest here) is a more conventional work for four contrabasses. These are all studio assemblies, meticulously crafted, deploying their materials with a fine ear for timbre and stereophony. They are also surprisingly attractive and easy to listen to; part lounge, part C20 experimental, part je ne sais quoi. 22 years covered, this collection is like a breath of fresh air; I can’’t recommend it strongly enough.
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