The methodology behind Anne-James Chaton’s new album is almost identical to that employed by beat author William Burroughs in his famed cut-up technique, which used randomly-selected texts, literally cut up and pieced together at random to create new texts. Chaton uses fragments of the everyday - ‘poor literature’ as he calls it - as his source material, from shopping lists and receipts to scraps and snippets of news headlines, often taking a single phrase and manipulating it to build something quite extraordinary.
Initially, the overlaid multitracked loops are disorientating, and often bewildering, but there are natural rhythms that emerge, and while it’s not exactly danceable, the rhythmic element does render the tracks at least halfway listenable. After a while, it's possible to become attuned to the subtle shifts in rhythmic patterns, the way that the phrases overlap and intercut and mutate.
The relentless repetition of phrases that combine to form a dizzying streaming stew of verbiage ensures that some phrases lodge themselves deep in your brain long before they’ve collapsed into meaningless. ‘Pop is dead / The king of pop is dead’ resonates and reverberates, and creates an intensified recreation of the experience of the 24-hour live streaming news media, the same headlines rolling around endlessly until they become an entity in their own right beyond the story itself.
|
The second half of the album – by which I mean the tracks 10 to 18 - are simply the bare bones, the individual component loops from which the album itself is constructed. These building blocks are, in themselves, nothing remarkable, but after as little as fifteen to twenty seconds, the hearing same phrase over and over can do strange things to a person.
‘Evenements 09’ might not make for the most enjoyable listening experience, but I’m convinced that exposure to these recordings has the potential to completely rewire the brain, and if you want an album that encapsulates of the media overload and self-alienating mechanisms of postmodern society, look no further. As insanity is the only sane response to our insane world, I’m compelled to recommend this album as essential listening. Just don’t blame me if there are adverse consequences.
Anne-James Chaton on MySpace
|
