Well this is last album of the day...Jacques Brodier Filtre De Réalité.......Volcanic Tongue.....Wow – this just landed in time to blow much of the amazing archival releases of 2012 out of the goddamn water: Jacques Brodier is a French visual artist and musician who uses an elaborately constructed musical instrument/broadcast receiver which he calls ‘The Reality Filter’ in order to channel unearthly voices and symphonic shortwave noise from out of the background omming of reality, reconfiguring them in ghostly compositions that combine grave-quaking bottom end with interstellar choirs of heavenly hertz, sudden snatches of malformed voice, eerie occulted instrumentation and the constant chatter that exists on the very edges of coming-into-existence. This, as far as I’m aware, is the first ever collection of this contemporary European occultist’s music to be even remotely available and there’s really no other word that describes what he does. In his reality-warping liner notes Brodier talks about falling in love with the space between the channels on shortwave radio, the sound of the depths of the forest, of the bottom of the ocean, and he spins off on a head-wheeling account of his theory of reality as constructed by self-explicating forms, carving tunnels through eternities of nothing using language and the decoding of spontaneous form in order to generate endless parallel realities. His soundings of the cosmos, then, become trackings of spontaneous intelligent life-forms, the sound of endlessly self-organising chaos, and it’s every bit as unnervingly beautiful as it sounds. Filtre De Réalité presents a number of short to medium length tracks that sees his Reality Filter scanning the heavens and using found broadcasts and solar activity and the sound of frequency giving way to frequency to trigger and conduct various sounds, creating a form of spectral symphonic séance that is as elementally moving as Alan Lamb’s wire work or William Basinski’s shortwave compositions and as uncannily disturbing as the Conet recordings or the EVP broadcasts, only here casting the transmissions from beyond as a form of genuine holy music, the sound of reality spontaneously giving birth to itself in waves of ethereal noise, distant starfield symphonies and booming hymns to endlessness. Suffice to say, you’ve never heard anything remotely like it. I’m completely blown away by the vision, sound and ideas behind this staggering release and you will be too. One of the albums of the year, hands down, beautifully realised by Penultimate Press, who brought us those gorgeous Graham Lambkin art books, and presented with a stunning full colour reproduction of Brodier’s visionary art on the sleeve and a glossy fold out insert inside. Expertly mastered by Jason Lescalleet. Highest possible recommendation!
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 19:37:48 +0000
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