Composed entirely from field recordings made at Rue Sainte-Beuve in Lausanne, Switzerland, between 2012 and 2013.
The title gives a clue. As a matter of fact, both artists utilised sounds and noises from the same construction site in Lausanne, to create two contrastive tracks manifestly characterised by the individual composer’s style.
Meirino’s Les Oiseaux Du Lac Stymphale is rather in-your-face, privileging the direct ‘participation’ of the workers in a number of acoustic close-ups revealing the classic bedlam of voices, crumbling materials and variegated clangors. The chemistry is improved by a broad compass of captivating frequencies, pulses and interferences: from huge subsonic bumps and hums to bizarre electronic tones and unorthodox sibilance. It’s an intriguing experiment in something that could be defined “enhanced musique concrete”, without ineffectual frills and special effects to perturb a listener merely inclined to focus on the whole’s inbuilt musicality.
In L’Hydre De Lerne Ilios grants some space to the aforementioned operational echoes, which at first made us think about a slightly different assemblage of equivlent factors belonging to the preceding episode. Fear not, though: after 180 seconds or so, one of the “lead singers” of the entire album — a monotone buzzing drill — becomes the origin of a monolithic agglomeration of electrically charged ‘oms’ progressively growing in quantity of layers, quivering intensity and volume as they depict a very gradual glissando (reinforced by a strong low frequency from the nineteenth minute), ultimately suggesting a majestic wall of heavily bowed strings. The piece ends abruptly as we have just reached the condition of intellectual standby necessary to be sublimated by the arresting force of that giant resonance.
Review by Massimo Ricci at Touching Extremes
