Jérôme Bouve & Delphine Dora — Vents d'Aether
Jérôme Bouve & Delphine Dora present an album of thoughtfully yearning magickal drone, encircled with field recordings, for their first collaboration, this album entitled Vents d’aether, released on Hallow Ground. The album has a twenty-minute opening track, titled after the album, followed by a series of shorter pieces.
Like Current 93, it seems to have a spirit reverent to antiquity, a similar melodic sensibility to neofolk, but stripped down. Most of the time, the only sound is harmonium or organ, at a funereal tempo (like the album Sleep Has His House, but with no narration. It is a recording with a sort of monastic or religious single-mindedness, ever pushing further into a trance-like state.
In its ascetic minimalism, it is quite uneventful; the tonal development of the harmonium is sluggish, and the mind wanders. The most eventful aspects are the thoughtless shifting and tumbling of coastal wind and water, until the harmonium rises in a great emotional, chordal crescendo for the last two minutes of the twenty-minute opening piece, complemented by church bells. This, and the eight-minute closer, "Montfarville V", are the melodic highlights of the recording.
Like something like Z'EV's The Sapphire Nature, or Organum's Amen, the point is not so much to fill the course of the compositions with content, but rather to emanate a piercing, clear light, a blinding emptiness, devoid of content. To be aligned with this goal is to forgive this recording's monotony, though there are certainly many who would have no desire to engage with the kind of mindset to which it aspires. Recommended for those looking for mind-focusing tools.