Fatale — Pour Vous

Sometimes release sleeves can be very deceiving, take “Pour Vous”  front cover with it’s arty black calligraphy lettering and deadhead centred black & white bow tie motif…you’d imagine this would be some kind of romantic yet slight dark female fronted indie band or maybe female singer/songwriter fare. But instead what’s on offer here is searing yet creative HN/HNW crossover.

Fatale  is the solo  project of Chicago based Elizabeth Floersch who seemingly has been making noise since mid 2010, and has so far put out three CDR’s plus this new release which I guess you'd classify as a mini album as it only comes in at just under the twenty three minute mark.  The CDR features three tracks in all- “Première Partie”(which is the longest track here at 11.31),  “Deuxième Partie”( at  6.50 mark) and “Finale”( at 5.01).

“Première Partie” starts off as a mixture of  lower tone churning carbonated bubbling textures with grating, squelching & juddering high pitch noise tones, and very slight smears of circling fairground or child like harmonics. At just after the three minute thirty point  this sawing & accelerating sheering sheet of buzzing noise is added, and  a neat sort of panicked mid-upper toned selection of tones swim together in an energetic sound soup that creates an nice urgent yet slight quirky textural battle. In it’s last few minutes the track dips down into sparse feedback like sweeps & judders. All told it’s an interesting & shifting start to proceedings.

“Deuxième Partie” is a little more straight forward,  but it's still quite brutally charming with it’s mixture of slightly pitch altering drilling ‘n’ droning mid tone electro judders, and grainy swirl static washers & muffled fan belt smarts. This track moves more towards ‘wallish’ moments, through the altering pitch drilling tone stops it from been total HNW.

So lastly we have “Finale” which is possibly the most surprising & distinctive of the three tracks here. It’s built around a fairly thin & grainy up ‘n’ down alarm pitch, feed back smarts ‘n’ bangs, and mournful yet beautiful female singing. The track makes for a usually mixture of creative yet stripped & focused noise making, and emotionally singing. A seared yet haunting end to the album.

It’s always nice to see female artists appearing in the mainly male dominated noise scene, and clearly from the sonic evidence on “Pour Vows”  Ms Flourish has a lot of talent for mixing up sometimes emotional & harmonic tinged HN/HNW cross. My only really criticism here is it all seems over too quickly, but I guess it’s better to want more than wishing for the release to end half way through.. Anyway I look forward to hearing future work from the project, and I hope Ms Flourish decides to use her voice more in her noise composition because it really does give her sound a very haunting & distinctive edge.