La Terre Tremble !!!

For the past ten years, La Terre Tremble !!! have been constantly redefining their own limits. With each new album, the trio question their inner musical tectonics while pursuing an obsessive quest for a chimerical and detail-laden sound; something enigmatic and delicately chaotic, equally as obvious and melodical as intelligent and sophisticated. Faced with the impossibility of bringing the world to a standstill, the three bandit experimenters strive towards slightly deformed and timeless idiosyncrasies, taking musical genres as frames to be transcended and sound (whether electric, acoustic or electronic) as a raw material for precise aural constructions, which tend to be just as heady as insidious. Their latest release is entitled ‘Fauxbourdon’ and it might just take you the same amount of time to tame it as it did for La Terre Tremble !!! to bring it into existence.

In 2005, three multi-instrumentalist tinkerers hailing from Rennes and Clermont-Ferrand  – Julien Chevalier, Benoît Lauby and Paul Loiseau – came together to form La TT !!!, rising to critical acclaim with the release of the album ‘Travail’ in 2009. In 2012 the slightly tragical and rhapsodic ‘Salvage Blues’ followed, overflowing with martial and extraterrestrial blues, sounding almost psychedelic but not quite. At the time the band was therefore categorised in turns as progressive, experimental, labyrinthine, post-punk, folk-rock, electronic, industrial, krautrock, math-rock, new wave… So many labels which testify to the sheer vertigo one feels when trying to pinpoint their sound. But La TT!!! was perhaps simply aiming to confront “pop” music with something a little more highbrow. On stage however, the band has become rather raw, boasting a makeshift drumkit which gets abuse from a doubled-up singer, two lunatic guitars and a load of electronic mess. They also spent three years cruising venues with their impressive cinema-concert ‘Tom & Jerry’, projecting obscure surrealist cartoons with a 1930s feel accompanied by a more electronic and acoustic instrumentation, rather than the usually very frontal amplified show.

And now ‘Fauxbourdon’ surfaces, constituting a collection of ten both gentle yet menacing tracks which come across as both uncanny and delicately anxiogenic: it’s somewhat like observing the boiling point of life, which rushes by, always just about to explode. Indeed, the band’s inspiration for the album seems to originate somewhere around 1956 with Don Siegel’s masterpiece ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers‘, but we can also mention Friedkin, Peckinpah, Frankenheimer and Aldrich as having a certain influence. The ‘Faux Bourdon‘ (False Bass) mentioned in the album’s title is less of a hint towards a continuous, musical tone than a suggestion of a mysterious background noise that embraces our existence; a dull, inaudible murmur, an invisible yet omnipresent fog, the atmosphere of the suburbs as conceived by John Carpenter, or the resounding reverberation of a past explosion.

We are certainly dealing with La TT !!!’s strangest album to date, whose compositional style oscillates constantly between something alien and freaky, gracious and dark. The vocals are ever more subtle and distant, the guitars more ghostly; thus leaving space for synthetic tones and primitive rhythms that can’t quite be described as electronic. One might be tempted to class the album as contorted futurist ballads, or progressive R’n’B, or even fake soundtracks for Italian cinema. Nods towards Japanese synthpop masters Ryuichi Sakamoto & Haruomi Hosono are skillfully disseminated here and there, alongside reminiscences of Ennio Morricone’s compositions for Elio Petri, hints of experimental library music (think BBC Workshop, White Noise, John Baker, or Aphex Twin’s modified pianos and drums), and a whiff of Robert Wyatt, Syd Barrett or Arto Lindsay. Beautiful and ample vocal harmonies filter through, emanating from a sunless, autarchical California inhabited by Brian Wilson’s neurasthenic ghost from the “Smiley Smile” period. We are also reminded of weird tracks by Curt Boettcher (Sagittarius, The Millennium) or Jim O’Rourke’s experimental pop. Last but not least we bump into Ernest Bergez aka Sourdure, letting rip in Occitan on one track and Samplerman (other alias: Yvang), the enigmatic artist who can take credit for the album cover executed in a zany collage style.

Devoted to melodical obviousness just as much as to electro-acoustic experimentation, cultivators of pure presence as much as of an imaginary (continental?) drift, La Terre Tremble !!! seems to cry out louder than ever with this release:  ‘Less is more… but more is better !’

LINE-UP
Julien Chevalier : guitar, synthesizers, vocals
Benoît Lauby : guitar, bass, synthesizers, autoharp, vocals
Paul Loiseau : drums, percussions, synthesizers, guitar, autoharp, keyboards, piano, vocals