Fauxbourdon

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 !’