Thinking can be Fun!
december 31, 2008.

by HarS


Let me begin with a few lines on Donation's CD Nouveau chemin de guerre, freshly released earlier this year, but surely not the easiest of 2008's releases to get your hands on. Donation is the french musician Mathias Dufil's moniker. Mathias gave me a copy of his album on an autumn evening earlier this year, when we both performed at La Miroiterie. That was on september 10th, as part of a 'Found Footage' event.
If I remember rightly, for his contribution to the evening Mathias mainly mixed field recordings from CD, mini disc, also from tape maybe, into a noisy ensemble; maybe leading them through a couple of effect machines, maybe not. I do not recall it in detail, which - I guess - means that it must have been pretty much the, eh, well ... the 'usual thing'.

When some days after the Miroiterie evening I listened to Mathias' CD, however, this turned out to be radically different from what I had expected. That was a surprise: I found myself listening to a song-singer, strumming an acoustic guitar to accompany the somewhat plaintive rendering of mostly slow paced songs, in a bitter-sweet melancholic french.

I like to be surprised. To come across something that manages to drastically dis-confirm earlier formed opinions.
It did not happen an awful lot this year ...
The more reason for me to enjoy Nouveau chemin de guerre.
I did play the record regularly over the past couple of months.
And that, of course, is interesting.
For it set me thinking. And thinking can be fun!

First there is the fact that Mathias tracks made me realize that at heart his 'traditional' singing and guitar playing actually were far more 'radical' than his noisy sound collage at la Miroiterie. This is partly a matter of context: when after having listened to 99 'experimental' and self-proclaimed 'other_music-ians' - most of which (unfortunately there is no denying) create pretty much interchangeable sound fields by maltreating in pretty much interchangeable and derivative manners old (of course) instruments, using cheap electronics and feeding back whatever can be fed back - there comes a 100th who picks up an acoustic guitar, tunes it and then sings a song ... then of course it is the (s)he who starts the song-singing that deviates from the norm and does the adventurous and risky bit ...

On second hearing, also, there is more to the record than just folksy guitar playing and singing. The record actually uses a lot of field recordings that are mixed in with the songs, and there is a nice drony track (Seule) where Mathias' ritualistic chanting is accompanied by a steady organ tone, a percussive rattling shake and sparse drumming. The abundantly used field recordings are not in there as mere 'sound effects'. They rather act as a separate voice, or instrument, like the (maybe over-obvious, but effective) pastoral birdsong in the instrumental Françoise. Sometimes the long recordings with people laughing, talking, chit-chatting - inside, in a bar or discotheque with loud music playing (Le Temps), or outside, eating (?), again with birds singing; or is that a separate recording? (Les Odeurs) - form the main voice. They suggest 'stories' involving those that were recorded, and the ensemble forces the listener to relate these to the 'stories' told by the lyrics of the songs.
This gives the album a nice cinematographic quality. It feels like documentary; it sounds like autobiography.

So I'm pretty content with my copy of Donation's CD. On the other hand: would my enthusiastic (over?-)reaction to Nouveau chemin de guerre not be related to the fact that, while writing entries to this very SoundBlog or otherwise working, all along this year my laptop's iTunes has been playing me an awful lot of Mountain Goats, especially the early lo-fi boombox-recorded records, that I 'discovered' by accident less than a year ago, while pretty much random surfing some LastFM playlists ?
It is certainly true that, notwithstanding my lasting passion for pure sound and free improvisation, these past couple of years I have come across too many simply bad or mediocre performances being passed off as 'noise' or 'experimental', and looking back on the year, indeed my best concert memories (as part of the audience, that is) are of those couple of occasions where the band was just up there having fuck-all fun. Like when Rhys Chatham did his Guitar Trio at the Studio Campus, or when the Stig Noise Sound System were jumping all over la Miroiterie...

Should I "pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday" ?


From the lyrics to The Who's song 'Won't get fooled again', from 1971; a track remarkable for its early use of a synthesizer to rhythmically modify the sound of the organ by voltage-controlled filtering.

This is maybe the most esquisite capture of c93 concert one could dream of. 40 minutes of delicate piano and overwhelming singing, soft and tender as the birds at twilight.
Sounds like a concert in front of ghosts. "The theatre is closed / and there is no applause." Imagine you were there, sitting in a corner like a small kitten, keeping quiet and silent... As if the slightest move would make those wild musicians run away from the stage. A second voice can soon be heard, almost unnoticeable, very far... Astonishing at the first listen ! But do not move yet, there are a few songs left to be heard... After those soft black pearls of huge beauty there is a weak version of A Sadness Song, too low paced perhaps, or sung with too much emphasis... Obviously we've heard this song so many times in so many different and beautiful ways... And Cashmore's guitar palying is far too different from Majah Elliott's piano. Same thing for the next track, until the piano rises back, bringing an incredible and inexplicable brightness in the song. Again, the disc gives a deep emotional impact. "All this world makes great blood", indeed.
The band closes the concert with an old hit, here revisited by the new crew. A droning guitar on repetitive piano chords, and Tibet who sings, alone.

"The original video was not great quality to begin with, so it is what it is. What's kind of interesting from a point of view of someone in New York City that day is the way the camera, which was set inadverdently on auto-focus, begins to lose focus as the light goes away… as we all did that horrible day."
William Basinski, answering by email to some questions regarding his work (especially the "Disintegration Loop" movie)

Look what the wind blew in: fresh air, a cool breeze, something new yet very familiar. Where have we landed? Bert Jansch's guitars, Veronique Sanson's voice, Luc Ferrari's soundscapes... Sounds like home. The house of a music lover who puts his love and knowledge in his music. Puts his life too. Joys and pains. Souvenirs. Makes us feel amongst friends. Known and unknown. A torn picture on the wall. Signs. Whispers. Wind. This is music. This is love. This is donation.

Once again and as usual, the veryvoice of verygod nan-tea-tree is back with an absolutely unexpectable sound which may scare to death those waiting for their famous neo-folk... It's dancefloor time now folks! After their first and only intrusion into this world (remember Crowleymass...) they're back with four hilarious yet very groovy tunes (I cannot help laughing out loud whilst thinking of people shaking their bodies on the lines "who will deliver me from myself"!). Nevertheless as a joke just could not be a good point enough to publish something new, the sound had to be there too. And it is indeed! The two sides attempt to build their own particular atmosphere, starting with the very energic (and very similar) mixes of Thirlwell, Matmos slowing it down to a rather dreamy ending.
I only wish I had discovered this instead of home in a club or a party, where it would have been a complete hallucinatory - if not patripassianist - experience!