Just when ‘ Drôles D’Oiseaux’ threatens to be just another safe, quiet ambient album with tweets and flickers and chiming drones, a chainsaw tears through the calm atmosphere, and the final moments of ‘Epigraphe et Overture’ are filled with the deafeningly loud splintering cracks of a tree trunk splitting and falling. It paves the way for the long sound-piece, ‘Safe ‘n’ Sound’, with traffic, not birdsong, providing the ambience. Violent clatters and bangs are interspersed with protracted spells of near-silence. It’s quiet, queasy, drones and crackles, creaks, squeaks and groans hang on the peripheries of audibility.
The main feature is the fourth and final track, ‘Je Vole’, subtitled ‘une lutte contre le disenchantement en 9 tableaux’ and with its 9 segued parts spanning 21 minutes. It’s intricate and by turns powerful and tranquil. Fractured melodies fleetingly emerge from amidst heavily grained noise before vanishing once more, with disorientating results.
|
|
