Etant Donnes — L'Étoile Au Front
L'Étoile Au Front is the next in the series of Etant Donnes reissues from the folks over at Klanggalerie. It was the French two-piece third release, originally appearing in 1982, and it saw the project pushing further their Musique Concrète and jarring field recording side, to offer up a difficult-if- largely intriguing record.
This reissue appears in the form of a CD- this is presented in a very sparse-yet- glossy black and white digipak. It features just a large white star on the front cover and minimal white texts. With no real background, explanation, or write-up, so of course, this deepens the mystery, and often sonic puzzlement of the whole thing.
The CD takes in six tracks-though due to the often jarring/ shifting structure of most of the tracks it really plays as one long sound ride. We kick off with seventeen and a half minutes of “Les 4 VSD” here we move from blends of sped-up tape reels, aircraft drone and bird song. Traffic sounds mixed with loose and wavering electro tones. All manner of low-fi machine purr, zip and pop. Low-flying aircraft drone and propeller tick, whispering vocal tones and weird breathing noises. Muffled voices and pared-back strange talking. Track two "À Temperature D'Or( Live in Grenoble 1981)" is the longest track here at nearing twenty-seven minutes mark. It starts with what sounds like a muffled and spluttering engine, with an angered French man spouting over the top. As we move on we get very blunt and loose blend machine-like bangs ‘n’ churns, unsettling honks -to-texturally stirrings, and just barely improv texturing. The deeper we getting in the wacky it seems to get we get what sounds like deaf ‘n’ dumb counting, sped-up machine tape reels, knockings that stop and start, blunt droning tones, tape hiss and comic sped-up vocals.
Moving onto the latter half of the album and we have the cut-up breathing sounds, tape pop, drifts of near silence, and sudden reel rips of the five minutes forty of “Les 4 Eux Deux”. There’s the nine minutes of “4 Poste Des Eux” which blends chatting children's voices, warbling-yet-never harmonic flute, cheers and cries, and sudden noise tone drops. And lastly, the nearing four and a half minutes of “Music From The Film Des Autres Terres Souples Part 2” which to start with is slightly more formally musical moments, as we have a repeated brooding horn drone element, but we also get moments of wacky sped-up tape sounds and other sudden jarring sound elements.
It’s so great to see Klanggalerie carrying on with their reissue of Etant Donnes back catalogue. I’d say you’ll need some love and grounding in the more abstract/ jarring side Musique Concrète/ industrial sound art to get the most out of this- but it’s certainly a real trip of a record, moving from manic and puzzling, to wacky and noise, onto brooding and still a little wacky. To pick up a copy direct follow this link.