Purgate — Leavings
Purgate is the project of Frederic Arbour, who has a background in techno music but has decided to branch out into more experimental territory with his latest music. Leavings is an album of surreal, resonant flickers, ambient feedback effects and granular synthesis for fans of minimal post-industrial soundscape artists like Nocturnal Emissions, David Lee Myers or Aube. The sound is texturally rich, with a pulsing, throbbing repetition, but there are no formal drums.
Like Ivan Pavlov's CoH project, or some works of Alva Noto, it's a kind of deconstruction of techno and 4/4 rhythmic music, with an arpeggiated 8-step sequencer backbone, thinned out to its most essential elements to emphasise subtleties in tone and structure. It's more understated than any club-bound music could actually be, with no thick low end or massive kick drums to guide a crowd. Its elegance and thoughtful construction are soothing to the mind. As a big fan of CoH, and a producer/listener of dance music myself, who is currently fatigued with the heavy compression ubiquitous in the genre, this album is perfect for my taste.
The sequence undulating like a snake, phasing delays spiral across the stereofield, built out of sculpted noise and air, filter pings that sound almost acoustic, like the crisp 'tink' of a bottlecap. Later in the album we come to know the saturated grit of analog oscillators' lower octaves. Each sound is vivid and novel, thrashing and spasm-madly with chaotic modulation. The rough analog texture of the music is distinctively modular, with a seemingly endless variation of rich timbres. The last track is called "Granular", and indeed much of the album sounds like it could be made with granular modules, sounding as if tiny bits of sound were cut and rearranged into new rhythmic forms. This final tune is the most harmonious, a chordal drone that sounds almost like a choir or a stringed instrument.
As a modular synth enthusiast myself, this album is close to my heart, and reflects the same thought process I've had about pushing music into new expressive forms. These are the most evocative, ear-pleasing sounds one could hope to find in electronic music. One of my favourite recordings of the year.