Emmanuel Allard — Nouvelles Upanishads Du Yoga
The sound source is apparently the Buchla 200E, which instantly makes me quite interested in the album. For those who don't know, the 200E is a modern digital re-vamping of a priceless/rare 70's analog synthesizer. It retains much of the character of the original, but has a decidedly harsher/colder edge to its tone.
Much like the music of KK Null, this music can be painful for its use of dog whistle frequencies beyond the possibilities of acoustic instrumentation. However, it is perhaps these frequencies which give the sound the direct, visceral hallucinatory effect it has. The sound immediately pierces through all distraction and draws the mind into a foreign and emotionlessly violently alien dimension. All sounds found here are disconnected, inhuman, take place in vacuum.
The textures are as rich and original as I could have hoped from the Buchla, and there are some very nice randomizing/generative patterns as well, another advantage of quality hardware. If I've any complaint, it's that Allard tends toward the cold, dissonant and distorted end of the Buchla's tonal spectrum. He doesn't intend to create a conventionally ear-pleasing or emotive sonic journey, it would seem. I'm glad to be so far from the syruppy safeness of new age, but some rounded sounds to contrast the jarring ugliness would have improved this album.
"Alephi Wave" is an 8 bit death cry, a classic 'lazer' sound effect annihilated into sharpened granules. It has an irreverent feeling, not unlike watching a toy soldier melt into a puddle of plastic. "L'Art Noir" is a resonant melodic glimmer, like a trumpet played inside a metal box, one of the few beautiful sounds on the album, a luminescent subterranean soliloquy that reminds me of classic Nurse With Wound. The album is certainly diverse, but will tend towards attacking and startling the listener periodically, with drastically contrasted volume levels, in some cases.
The final track "Gold Rand" is far longer than the others, at 15 minutes, and presents a deep, rounded bass drone with quite mind altering effect. The tone of the drone wavers up and down like the motor of a car. The sound vibrates the bones; in one sense it is immersive, in another sense it is maddening.
Ultimately, this album is reasonably good for what it is, a loosely organized display of the colder and more volatile of the Buchla's possibilities. At times, it hints at the ritualized psychedelic power of Coil or The Hafler Trio, but remains instead clinical, detached, the product of a kind of scientific experimentation process. It will only appeal to those with a taste for truly grating high pitched beeps, siren tones and bit-crunched digital snow, all presented freeform, with no particular musical context. If you're a fan of KK Null or psychedelic digital noise, I would recommend this, as I think it covers a good amount of different ground, though it seems to lacks an overall theme to make it cohesive or listenable as a larger piece of work. I suspect that a few jams with the Buchla myself could quickly result in a similarly meandering, disconnected slice of alien feeling ambience. "L'Art Noire" is a fantastic track, but most of the album does not possess the same ambient qualities. I look forward to hearing somebody apply such sounds to something more focused.