One can easily imagine the brouhaha that would have erupted had Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes (Music for 3 pregnant women) been issued under Marc Leclair’s Akufen pseudonym, since listeners desperate for more of My Way’s chopped radio snippets and crisp microhouse beats will hear very little of that on this latest release. In short, Musique pour 3 femmes enceintes is most assuredly not an Akufen album; what it most assuredly is, however, is marvelous, a richly textured travelogue of tactile ambient soundscaping. Leclair brings a different though no less accomplished and sophisticated sensibility to this music as he does to his dance-oriented Akufen and Horror Inc. tracks. What results is work that’s equal in caliber to Leclair’s other recordings, though obviously more of a listening experience than a dance album.
Inspired by the pregnancy of his wife and two friends, the project is an ode to the experience of impending motherhood. Divided into nine sections (marked by day totals, like “180e jour” for section seven, for example), the work’s 72-minutes parallel the stages of pregnancy with the music slowly unfurling in a continuous stream of ambient and more propulsive episodes. The term ambient is used reticently here, because Musique is anything but aural wallpaper. Consider the marvelous opening section, a ‘Marc Leclair vs. Rechenzentrum’ production. It begins with a wavering drone that’s gradually overlaid by prickly stabs, weaves of whirrs, clicks, throbs, and surging washes panning from left to right, with the drone then mutating into a slowly modulating theme; by its midpoint, the piece has become a more animated, multi-layered mass of tactile digitalia. Field sounds of insects, warblers, and loons indicate that the fourth section has burrowed into the Canadian wilderness, though the piece is marred by the overused cliché of water sounds.
Whether by accident or design, the album references the fertile templates of distinctive precursors—Steve Reich, Chain Reaction, the clinical sound fields of Raster-Noton—that Leclair merges with signature elements of his own style. The surging, swirling mass of silken guitars in part six recalls Reich’s Electric Counterpoint though Leclair bolsters the arrangement’s punch with subtly swaying rhythms. In section eight, he pairs Chain Reaction’s trademark steely burble and dubby smears with glistening guitar plucks and skipping beats. Akufen devotees will be heartened by the appearance of clipped voice fragments in section five and microhouse ripples in section seven.
Of course, Leclair designed the album’s musical development so that it would mirror the trajectory of the pregnancy process; hence the opening sections float in a more aqueous, ambient manner while later sections escalate in intensity and propulsion. But, to his credit, he also deviates from this obvious linear trajectory by having the album weave unpredictably through multiple moods, even if climaxes of sorts can be detected in parts six and eight. Ultimately, though, familiarity with the album’s concept is hardly necessary as the music impresses splendidly sans any programmatic associations.
Ron Schepper |
