Franck Vigroux — Atotal

Prolific French experimental musician Franck Vigroux has released many recordings, dating back to the early 2000s, many of which were created using a guitar.  His new album, Atotal, is a departure from this, an experiment in composition using analog electronic hardware.

My initial impression upon hearing the rough industrial drum machines and distorted cut-up collage of the first track is that this music essentially sounded like the instrumental B-sides and soundtrack work of the classic groups like Skinny Puppy, Ministry and Front Line Assembly, particularly Cevin Key & Dwayne Goettel's "Doubting Thomas" project, or Bill Leeb's early albums as Delerium (before the transition into lighter trance).  The rhythms here are the same kind of heavy halftime electro and breakbeats as heard in those projects.

We don't hear as much sampling from film as was done in these 80's projects.  This technique has generally fallen out of favor, as modern digital movies would no longer have the warm, crackling audio fidelity that gave that classic 'film sample' energy.

Layers of synth and guitar noise are copiously piled upon the beats, and I think this is where the album's weakness lies.  The collage of sounds feel overly cluttered, too chaotic to point to a specific atmosphere, theme or collection of mental images.  Where Doubting Thomas' instrumentals would create a clever call and response between samples, melodies and ambient elements, in the case of most of these tracks I find most of the sounds placed overtop the beats to be aimless improvisations in often ugly distorted tones.  

Though by all accounts, guitar has been Franck's main instrument over the years, I can't say I enjoy any of the guitar sourced sounds found on this album, which have a ringy, cheap distortion I would associate with bedroom noise rock or black metal.  It feels as if the wrong frequency bands have been accentuated, making the tone all the more harsh and muddy, and leading to a very cluttered mix.  The distortion would be fine if used with more specific intent.  

The songs rarely have any kind of lead sequence, and Vigroux seeks to fill that space with discordant swells of noise, side-chained to the kick drum, which is sometimes harmonized with pedals, but never quite assumes a lead character.  This may be nitpicking, but if you're going to create a throwback album of industrial downtempo, it's perhaps also important that sidechain compression as heard in modern techno and trance was not done yet at this time.  This technique is designed to create space in a mix, which this mix somehow still does not have.

Genuine atmospheric moments appear sporadically, such as the colorful, luminous warmth of "Perdu".  The key here is there is a great deal more space for elements to form a meaningful interaction with each other, as this is a beatless track, and Vigroux has notably held back from coating the entire track in 3 layers of high gain fuzz.

I find myself wishing Vigroux had focused on the softer, more subtle side of the industrial ambient style, as the execution of the more aggressive music here is indecisive and fatiguing.  Vigroux attempts to take the space in this musical genre typically filled by lush pads, punctuated synth leads, film samples and ambient backdrops and occupy it solely with his twice overdriven guitar.  I enjoy the sparse landscapes created by the track intros and slowest pieces only to be reminded of the tiresome, confused over-density when the energy picks back up.  Unfortunately, I can't recommend this one.  I'll give it a 2/5 for the solid halftime backbeats.