A fine art Gallery/Record label combination is a particular combination of roles that when attended to as a sound event you may very well form a group show; artist as curator of album exhibition. Christophe Bailleau’s album for Parisian Art Galley Optical Sound brings together American multi instrumentalist Neal Williams, Belguim/French multi disciplinary artist Phillippe Franck & Belguim singer songwriter Niko Hafkenscheid. In a sense the introduction opens the album as a room of discrete acts soundscapes on display, themes to engage with, questions of technical form and achievement, much the same as any gallery event.
Thus: Forgery, the clatter and the percussive dissonance behind simple melodic banjo and guitar loops, crowd sounds, building and morphed into an intangible sonic impression. A Night of Real Recognition leaves the electronic landscape, both as a form of dirge and sharp sonic violence as background to Neal Williams bright poetics and guitar, eventually overcoming the scene. Promised Land, Niko Hafkenscheid paean to a searching mind encapsulated in song, the quest and destiny, tinkering in the background fills out this theme. Bailleau adds his voice to Walk the Curse, interplaying traditional instrumentation with electronic manipulation in a rich peak experience. The ghosting hour, delivers a clear wall of sound interplay between sources, manipulation, poetic experience and clarity, before giving into sonic spatial play. Happy Death day is just out there, hard core (not stylistically) rough play with sound and the darkest of lyrics. I’ll be there, a studied and controlled piece, displaying the mastery of the players over form.
Walking into this exhibition is a dangerously rewarding act, it displays all the sides, of these artists, the points at which they meld perfectly, the parts where voices and elements show discord and ‘battle’ for the sonic foreground. If all painting/music was, in this long overplayed analogy, merely what the painter/musician plonked in front is not the real point. The landscape it is the interplay of elements and the ideas revealed in the application of technique to the subject which is conversely just a device. The poetic grace resides not just in the form poetics when Williams or Hafkenscheid enter the picture but also in the sound manipulation whose buried language whispers the programmer’s mantra, ‘code is poetry’, structure and its products are brimming with wonder.
Innerversitysound
*
