Philippe Petit – Eugenie (Alrealon Musique)

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Philippe Petit: Eugenie (Alrealon Musique)

Sound artist Philippe Petit runs the Bip Hop label and works mostly in collaboration, with Cosi Fanni Tutti, Lydia Lunch, and Cindytalk among others. On Eugenie, dedicated to his four-year-old daughter (who provides the artwork and sings on one track), Petit is joined by an ensemble of chamber instrumentalists, including cellists Bela Emerson and Helen Money, and über-pianist Reinhold Friedl, creating a “cinematic adventure, where luscious string arrangements convey a whole world of emotion and the organic sound of the instruments is never overshadowed by the machines”. In this sense, Eugenie is a less processed recording, but a genuine collaboration, where the electronics and processing sit beside and engage with the acoustic instruments.

The brief opener ‘An Air of Intrigue’ functions as an icebreaker, a frenzied mélange of digital noise, amplified bowing (Alexander Bruck’s viola-strohviolin), harmonica, the clink of ice cubes, and feedback, all chopped with rusted shears and randomly rearranged. The rest is more measured and enjoyable, ‘Clapoutique’, despite the crowd of Friedl, Money, Els Vandeweyer’s vibraphone, Hervé Vincenti’s “oscillatin’ bass/guitar” and Monty Adkins “soundscapes”. It recalls a stripped back pickin’ session, but recorded all wrong, instruments blindly playing on beneath caverns of distortion and bass presence. ‘Pyramid of the Moon’ sets up a looped shuffle from Jenny Hames’s violin and Paul J. Rogers on “guitar-melodica-broken zither”, recalling a dub version of Reich’s Different Trains. The final ‘Magma from the Aquarium’ takes up the whole B-side at eleven minutes and crams it with electronic fizz, tape warp and caveman yelps but it lacks the focus of the preceding tracks. These alone make Eugenie a fascinating study into chamber-electroacoustic working methods, and they’re a damn fine listen.

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