Roxane Métayer — Perlée de sève

How can a piece of music be narrative without in some sense doing violence to its status as music, something listened to or heard, and not a text? Maybe it is not the musical sounds themselves that are supposed to be doing the narrating, but their function within a system – tracks as part of the larger album experienced in temporal procession, listening from beginning to end, and so on. The time in which a piece of music plays, the time in which it was produced, and the time of paying attention to it, seem inescapable constraints, to be sure, but where does that leave the overarching story, if there is one? Without getting too bogged down in questions that are best left to the bureaucrats of music history and theory, it is still worth at least a mention in the case of Roxane Métayer, whose work as a scholar, artist, while brief to date, does investigate the structural basis of storytelling, myth-making, and, yes, narrative.

In the course of the eleven pieces that make up Perlée de sève, there is less a narrative drive than a drive to narrate, which reveals itself in Métayer's desire for the accoutrement of a good auditory tale – field recordings, hints of voice, and their combination into a large whole. The compositions are miraculously devoid of a central axis of rhythm or harmony: the "sources" are all there is, sounds in and of themselves, divorced from any clear, stable point of reference. Perlée de sève is indeed a form of storytelling, then, but one crafted out of the autonomous voices of the instruments employed, not in service of a unified sense of meaning. The pieces are laid bare, even as they necessarily fold back into the time of the album. In what sense do they belong together? This seems the real question at stake here. It is only in the act of listening to that things come together, because, well that's unavoidable, and Métayer knows this, I suspect.

This is very highly recommended for fans of electroacoustic improvisation and experimentation, who enjoy a good disappearing act, with the caveat that the reveal is really all there is. To find out more