Translating as "hare's ears," "Oreledigneur" has become a blanket termto mark the assorted collaborative works of this duo, proprietors andkey players of the Fringes/Bowindo camp, responsible for two of themore remarkable release schedules in improvised elecroacoustics toappear in recent years. Though it is their third album under the name, Oreledigneuris the first produced by Giuseppe Ielasi and Renato Rinaldi alone,despite their countless outsourcing of material for labelmates'releases. Not only do the duo's friends feed happily off of theirever-expanding stockpile of skeletal acoustic ambience, field capturesand intimate electronic scavenging, but the artists themselves drawfrom these private sessions to fill gaps in their own solo work. Arecent example would be Ielasi's Plans which uses generoushelpings of Rinaldi's endlessly warm percussive meanderings and lushacoustic surface-testing to fill the gaps between the disc's moresculptural inclusions, like the cyclical guitar figures that helpdelineate the piece's turns. With such a picked-apart history, theOreledigneur sound might be tempting to describe as glamorized filler,as the yet-unrefined bursts of inspiration from these two stalwartsound explorers, rushed to tape in a frenzy and either given over tofuture improvements or left to stew in their own crudity. Luckily, Oreledigneurthe album, while not without its rough edges, is no collection ofthrowaways. Rinaldi and Ielasi have clearly taken time to blend andpolish five concise statements of mission, each a distillation of thetensions the duo seems compelled to uphold, and of the surprisingly"available" emotional quotient of their work, solo and otherwise. Trueto the sensibilities of both artists, there is a constant dynamicbetween sounds with a genuine "presence" or immediacy (often due totheir connection with recognizable instrumentation or phenomena) andother sounds that appear as if glimpsed across a dreamy distance,suspended in the same near-nostalgic limbo that consumed Plans.Any sense of crudity in the music is likely an immediate response tothe forced tension between the surface sounds, like the labored enginechugs or metallic patter that opens the disc, and the more opaqueunder-layers, the rich atmospherics flaking restlessly off Ielasi'sbrittle guitar or dropping from the great underwater bells anddoor-hinges that might now be signature Bowindo sounds. The effect ofthis kind of tension, rising as the disc progresses, is that the soundsmore comfortably left half-filled-in, those shifting about with noclear resolution, become the ones that carry the greatest degree ofemotive weight. The sense of longing that these nebulous patches ofchiming guitar and blooming analog fragments provoke seems somehowinappropriate in the face of the blank machine drones, everydaymechanics, and scattered street ambience that populate the foregroundof Oreledigneur. The effected result, to borrow a phrase, is"nostalgia for nothing," emotion without center that shifts nervously,though sincerely, with each listen, guarded against sentimentality butalways left somewhere, hanging. While the previous Oreledigneurproductions offered similarly beautiful, barely-anywhere bits ofecstasy, neither came close to these trembling heights.Read More
