Today the Gatineau act Album which is the project of Olivier Fairfield & Simone Provencher dropped the album Portrait De L’Artiste via Telephone Explosion.
A dark eerie film-noir experimental jazz vibe album.
About the album by Simone:
On Portrait de l’artiste they intentionally embrace aspects of jazz, but contrary to expectation, this only makes their unclassifiable essence more apparent.
The record’s first single “Salade” includes generous helping of jazz-isms, but rather than anchoring the music within any tradition, the elastic pulse of the drums and robust acoustic bass—courtesy of longtime collaborator Philippe Charbonneau (Scattered Clouds, Boyhood)—work to cast all the other ingredients into stark relief.
“5BPM” meanwhile, is a more abstract affair with regurgitated percussion tumbling across electronics-haunted atmospherics, hoarse-sounding bowed bass, and dim chimes. The album’s title cut is a gentler piece, pitting a sleepwalking patter of drums against half-submerged vibraphone, and delicate classical guitar, which Provencher scavenged from Kijiji for $50.
Scott Warren is another vital guest on Portrait de l’artiste. The self-identified anti-instrumentalist is a staple of the Ottawa-Gatineau improv community, performing on a wide variety of different tools from acoustic instruments to consumer electronics. He introduces his tactile signatures to the overall soundscape variously wafting, warping, writhing and sputtering around and alongside Album’s core contributors. Charlotte Savoie offers further intrigue, joining Provencher and Fairfield in murmuring vocal textures that veer in and out of audibility and heighten the music’s delirious ambiguity.
As this uncanny assortment of elements coalesce, listeners are given a hallucinatory world that leaves a potent, vaguely unsettling, impression and yet eludes the memory at the very same time.
Portrait de l’artiste gets: 📷📷📷📷📷📷📷/10.
Album – Portrait de l’artiste [Streaming]
