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LABEL PROFILE N-REC With the implosion of the prolific Mille Plateaux menagerie of labels appeared absence. The outlet for the trajectories the Szepanski cabal had been charting went flatline. One could feel it overwhelm artists invested in what Kim Cascone calls the “post-digital” aesthetic: the glitchy laptronics of ambience magnified, sinewaves twisted and matrix landscapes scoured with patches and processor circuitry. As the shockwave passed through the global community networks and once again upset channels of distribution, the resulting vacuum reopened space for smaller labels to breathe. France’s N-Rec, founded in 2003 by Benoît Courribet, is a comparable endeavor to the previous plateaus. Although smaller in magnitude, N-Rec has been quietly releasing intriguing probes into abandoned microsonic and borderline electroacoustic territories (the frugal field of 12k, Trente Oiseaux, etc.). Compact, independent, less monolithic labels are once again rising to represent the widespread influence of deep-listening electronics in areas of the world beyond the obvious metropoles; on the same channel, they are posing challenging experiences via the interstices between the academics and the digirati. Enter N-Rec. Courribet, former Acces(s) festival organizer, Xnoybis heavy-metal band member and composer, has studied at IRCAM and the University of Paris 8 (under Horacio Vaggione, where he is scribbling his doctorate in Computer Music). He also collaborates with composer Christian Zanési of GRM (Groupe de Recherche Musicales, founded by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry in the early 50s, known today for the GRM-Tools plug-ins, which Courribet works on). “I was kind of frustrated with the way experimental music was going on,” writes Courribet via email, shortly after his wedding. “Big labels were not taking risks, and were beginning to all sound the same. I’m a big electroacoustic music fan (and working in the domain of music research) and I wanted to find a way to propose this music to another audience.” The two opening releases by Frédéric Nogray and Heller launchpad the transgenre flight. Paranoid that N-Rec would be labelled “really fucked up and irritating music,” Courribet balances Nogray’s purist descent into minor key sinewaves (Panotii) with Heller’s smooth and granular ambiance (.09..03.). While some may find Nogray’s abstraction overwrought, his sound manipulation is disarming, much in the vein of Pure’s 2002 Noonbugs excursion. The dedicated logic of the piece, as the ascent/descent waveform rides its rollercoaster track, unfolds in drawn-out studies of oscillation and feedback, and while never leaving its tweeter-bashing behind, widens its breadth to encompass a few fragmented sections of pulse interference. It is in the latter that one hears Nogray’s years of improvisational electronics with the likes of Nobukazu Takemura. Yet, the piece never reaches escape velocity; it culminates by asserting a thought-process rather than a sonography, and will probably be (fairly) critiqued for its adamant deduction of aural principles to the detriment of experimental whimsy (“listenability” be damned). Heller and his .09..03. fairs better, but only if one calls for undulating pleasure as the nucleus of deep listening. Where Nogray is challenging (if not disturbing), Heller is succulent, if not soothing. Perhaps this is due to the duality of Heller as the negotiation between Sébastien Roux’s guitar drones and Eddie Ladore’s laptopic processes, and, although with few vestiges of the 70s lineage of ambient Enoism (save for the general concept), Heller perhaps unwittingly addresses the level to which glitch and granular have become normative palettes (at the verge of operating constraint themselves). Taken separately, the discs are enterprising if not tentative forays into electroacoustic and microsonic ambient sensibilities, respectively. Taken together (as they were released) they well represent the Janus-face N-Rec adeptly carves with the third release, Levitate, a various artists compilation designed, says Courribet, to nurture the label’s artistic identity. This collection calls attention to its programming. As it traverses from the safe grounds of stratospheric glitches and brainwave ethereality, it scuttles into black holes of density, disjointed and disruptively lurking at an event horizon of sabre-sharp noise, ending with the molecular structure that comprised the atmospherics of its sweeping entrance. Courribet’s intent is well executed: rather than a “compilation,” the disc takes on the journey of an offworld manifesto bent for android ears, a 21st century symphony that navigates the ambient to electroacoustic. From the disc’s opening shuttle orbits to the finale with its fiery atoms fissioning Dante’s inferno, N-Rec maps out the “acousmatic ambient.” The comp is a cheatsheet to N-Rec’s aural output, focusing on the predominance of spatialized sound design with able, intelligent and precision-engineered contributions from Sogar (with Roux), Pep, Coh, Main, Mokira, E-Di (a.k.a. Ladore) and relative newcomers Fabriquedecouleurs, Plimplim, JPE and Cylens (Courribet himself). Emoticons and all, Courribet emails that “I’ve really tried to consider the label as a real artistic project, but…people prefer buying Clicks and Cuts Vol. 73, listening to the same artists over and over again.” Given that future “clicks ‘n’ cuts” appear unlikely in this solar system, N-Rec might find itself one of the few carriers of the conceptual approach to curatorial sonics. In any case, Courribet plowed on with a fourth release that unveils a new artist in epochal ambient glitch style, Staffan Wessman, whose premier recording is titled, appropriately enough, Debut. Wessman’s composition is unique not for its content but for its patient, near meditative approach to repetition. Distinct from minimal techno’s isolated insistence—its strategies of silence defining repetition in the sound object’s absence—Wessman, much like Loscil, prepares his canvas with the colors of convolution: spectrum-thick hues find grace in their blend. The sound is thick, like muggy, hot air, yet its pinprick glitches speak of winter’s pointillistic ice crystals. As the title suggests, this is Wassman’s entry point, and with a respectful nod he curtails attempts to outshine or overcome the array of problematics associated with the genericism found in ambience. What he focuses on is the work and its dozy effect, a dazed yet glittering pace that manages to avoid succumbing to an overdependent complexity or reliance on prepackaged drones. These releases, all packaged in slimline jewel cases and designed with an almost cubist mindset, mark yet another cloaked entry into what may become archival items for the collector’s basket in years to come. Courribet speaks with evident excitement about his fifth release, the last ever recording of Robert Hampson as Main. “The CD will consist of a piece (“Parallax”) that has been premiered in a multi-channel environment (the legendary Acousmonium) at the Presences electroniques festival last February 2005.” Tracing the infinite lines that form the in-between of acousmatic ambient may catalyze the resurgence of composition (as distinct from the copycats and analog ancients), injecting this century with the invention it so obviously desires. TOBIAS C. VAN VEEN • www.n-rec.com |
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