d'incise
"lethargie & autres animaux rugueux"

ATCD04.2010


d'incise is a member of the Audioactivity, music & visual collective founded in 2000 in Geneva (CH). In 2002 he starded to produce different kinds of electronic music, from dub to electronica, dangerously sliding to the more experimental ways of electroacoustic. His world is made with sound fractures, nevralgic crepitations, melancolic atmospheres and a non-dissimulated fascination for rust and faded rhythms.

"Lethargie...", his newest CD, is not far from described above. A mixture of field recordings, objects and distant melancholy makes it a very intense - and rewarding -sound experience.


Tracklist:

01. suspension
02. léthargie
03. terrain vague du ciel
04. au creux du bras
05. tout proche
06. dégradable (dragos tara: doublebass)
07. bribes de jardin caché





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REVIEWS:

D’incise is the moniker used by a musician I seem to have stumbled across quite a bit this year. he is one half of the Swiss duo Diatribes whose music I have written about once or twice, and seems to release music at quite a rate, though most of it under the radar of most of the trendier improv/experimental press. I have another disc by Diatribes sat in the pile awaiting my attention, but given the vague similarities between tonight’s solo CD and the Fergus Kelly disc I wrote about last night I thought I would spin this seven track album tonight.

Like the Kelly release, this release on the Audiotong label, named Léthargie & autres animaux rugueux (Lethargy and other rough animals?!) is a computer sequenced construction that uses mostly percussive samples and recordings to form the bulk of the sound, with some crackling hissing electronics added in and the occasional appearance of field recordings having a similar impact to the Kelly disc last night. The music on this album has a similar dark, furtive feel to it as well, though D’Incise does not use rhythm in any obvious way, preferring to layer textural, often metallic sounds over each other to form often quite dense, rich strata. There is little to no silence, and although Léthargie couldn’t really be described as a loud album it has a depth and sense of excited industry to it that gives the impression of intense, rapid activity.

A little like Vanessa Rossetto’s Mineral Orange album, what I like about Léthargie is the choices made when it comes to placing two or more sounds together. There seems to have been a lot of thought gone into the way the tracks evolve, often slowly through gradually intensified layering, or often from the sudden addition or subtraction of key elements. D’Incise has a real feel for the way tracks start as well, and it seems as if much thought has gone into these mini-explosions of sound that follow the couple of seconds of silence between tracks. The third piece, Terrain vague du ciel opens with a firm crash of some gamelanesque percussion right after the second piece had slowly ground to a steadily liquidised halt just before. I think I have played this album four times before writing about it, but even on the fourth spin this evening this sudden leap in sound in the gap between tracks made me jump and nearly spill my glass of wine.

The fourth track, Au creux du bras is quite wonderful, a massed blend of tinkling bells and hissing, humming air conditioning like sounds combined with a series of field recordings of chickens, church bells, small children apparently calling to cats and who knows what else in there. This piece is really cinematic in feel, with the sounds seeming to fall from everywhere. Its really nicely composed and ends before it outstays its welcome. the following piece, Tout Proche then changes tack completely, consisting of thin layers of oddly sinister growling, burbling electronics, quite unlike much I have heard before.

So why isn’y D’Incise talked about more often? Why isn’t this album in anyone’ end of year charts? I suspect that not having English as a first language, and so not spending time in the right online company has kept his music under the radar. Léthargie… though is so similar to the Fergus Kelly album I wrote about last night, or maybe Vanessa Rossetto’s work simply because it has been composed, formed, crafted without its potential audience in mind, because it probably doesn’t have that big a potential audience, but instead it has been created out of a sheer love of the material, the sounds, the music. Its a very fine album, that like the best music in this kind of area keeps you locked in and entertained from start to finish. Its one that isn’t likely to get talked about much, so I am very happy to mention it here and give it a big thumbs up.

(Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear)



D’Incise is the Swiss experimenter with a laptop and heaps of attitude; on Léthargie & Autres Animaux Rugueux (AUDIOTONG ATCD04), he’s doing many interesting things with field recordings stored inside the computer and unloosing them in such ways as to paint uncertain and doubtful portraits of the modern world. The sounds are now almost-musical, now documentary, and subtle digital treatments are applied to further the aims of this critical essayist. Layers upon layers create alluring non-patterns of superimposed events, revealing further uncertainties. Dragos Tara adds the double bass to one track, but mostly this is a sound-art report back from the frontiers of D’Incise’s inquiring mind rather than a piece of music.

(Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector)