Some tima ago I read a page about garbage disposal and it gave me what I thought a great idea to make music .. I thought i'd used grinders instead of garbage disposal because I had none at hand . I began to search what had been done already with house appliances and I found this record : and I found it so good .
Diane Labrosse is a musique concrète composer (also an improviser) from Quebec, Canada.
''Keyboardist and sampler artist she is a core member of the Montreal avant-garde music collective Ambiances Magnétiques. She switched from keyboards to the sampler and from rock to electronica improv.'' (biography Francois Couture) .
She has called her music funny and poetical names.
She has worked with Haco, Martin Tétreault, Ikue Mori and many many other people I don't know yet.
With this album released in 2007
(http://www.ambiancesmagnetiques.com/)
she focuses on 8 everyday-life objects that are on the verge of extinction: ticking alarm-clock, coffee grinder, tape deck, old telephone, black and white television, old printer, tape answering machine and electric percolator. I'm not sure if all of those are actually on the verge of extinction, but perhaps that's because I use a manual coffee grinder. (coffee lover) Probably some are disappearing in the West though, but the author is around 50, so she has known them... Anyway, enough with the concept of the disappearing world and on with the music.
Track 1 is quite simple. It begins with many layers of alarm clock ticking, accompanied by what seems at first to be snoring (field recording of Mr Labrosse I thought at first ?) but quickly it appears that it is really a trumpet imitating snoring to perfection. I usually don't like it much when players imitate real-life sounds with their instruments because to me it often looks like they are displaying their mastery of the instrument (virtuosity..) but in this case it works for me, because it is very light and funny.
The sound of ticking and the trumpet are gradually covered by a guitar strumming on one string. It starts off like a drone but no, it turns into a melody, not a very obvious one, but a delicate melody. It reminded me a little bit of the music by Robin Guthrie/Harold Budd for the movie Mysterious Skin by Greg Araki, maybe I'm mistaken it's old . Unsurprisingly, the track ends with the alarm clock ringing. I thought this was a charming track, especially the beginning .The guitar gives it a little progressive or new-age feel .
OK now track 2 deals with manual coffee grinder !
Great Cajun violin to begin with (I love Cajun music) the grinder really sounds like steps in the snow, when your shoes crush the snow as you walk your way home... Hum, maybe I say Cajun because she's from Quebec, because it also has an Eastern touch to it,and with the addition of vargan really turns it into a slowed-down party music. There's also some gentle humming in the background, giving it a very folk art feeling. I loved this track.
Track 3 is all about tape decks. There's also some whistling, something like an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, definetley a Western movie atmosphere to it. The tapes really get rolling (I think she's fast forwarding them) and a bass guitar starts playing a simple melodious pattern. This is pretty much the same as in track one: the object as sound source plays in the background and an instrument playing a simple song is layered over it . I think the sounds of the tape are interesting themselves and it's a shame they are masked by obvious melody (I must say I don't like the sound of the bass played here much).
Here I realize this is not really musique concrète after all, but composition using one object as a sound source each time, not always at the front in the mix.
Track 4 is fantastic. Diane Labrosse plays accordion, great low sounds, very menacing, while the telephone emits pulses and rattles regularly. There is also a synthesizer sound that punctuates everything, it sounds like something Giorgio Moroder could have done for the Scarface soundtrack (hey, second analogy with a movie soundtrack, this is working as a soundtrack for an imaginary movie cliché !!)
If anyone's interested, it feels like expecting an important call or hesitating to make one, and when you finally make that call, no one picks up the phone ! Once again, this would be terrible to listen to alone at night, I'm glad I played this in day light.( you'll think I'm a coward !) The accordion plays different chords, dramatically rising as the ringing comes. Good as a good horror movie.
Track 5 uses black and white TV, but it's not clear where at the start, since the piece begins with table-tennis sounds, and sirens... but the good old black and white TV comes in around the middle in the form of a big white noise, almost covering everything up... nothing like an old b&w TV set to get a good static wall of noise. I like the bells a lot. In fact, there are two kinds of tracks on this album: those where it's really a matter of putting layers of sounds one above the other, and the only criterium is: do you like the sounds in themselves or not ? The other type of tracks is more a matter of composing with the sound of the object themselves, not playing traditional instruments over the objects' sound.
To me, track 6 definetly belongs to this 2nd category of tracks. Some might not like it because, first of all, it has beat. I mean a steady beat from a rythm machine. It is even reverberated... but if you are not put off by these things (I like electronica a lot), there is much to enjoy here. She has sampled her old printer, cut up the sounds very precisely and mix the beat with them. It reminds me a lot of the click and cut music that was happening a few years ago, especially when she starts using delays and reverb on the printer sounds. Maybe it is not original music anymore, but it is a very nice piece with a retro thing (Star Trek ?)
Track 7 consists in a simple, funky bass guitar riff (I like the slightly overdrive sound much more than the too polite bass on track 3) and various messages, I guess received by the composer, on her tape-answering machine. It's amusing, because of all the different acccents and languages you can hear in the background, a kind of musical joke.
I am super-enthusiastic about track 8. I have played it over and over again. The piece starts with layers of sounds obtained through manipulations of electric coffee percolator. There are many layers of sounds according to me, and even a very slight rythm (just a thud, not like track 6 at all). Over this mechanical background, she introduces a gorgeous wave of sound. It sounds like processed-guitar like some Fennez music, very slow and beautiful. I know it may sound easy to some people, this superposition of a mechanical rattle with a melodious, dramatic wave, but you would really have to be cold-hearted not to feel the emotion of this track. As the layers of percolator sounds grow denser, the wave gets distorted in some places, I thought of the Disintegration Loops of William Basinski . so I guess there might be an arpegiator at work there ?? .
This track reaches balance between the two categories I tried to define earlier, it is composed but at the same time the sound source sounds as if it was freed, the worlds of everyday objects and instrumental composition really meet here on a simple middle ground...
This is a good ending for Diane Labrosse 's album on this track..