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Charlemagne Palestine & Joachim Montessuis, "Voxorgachitectronumputer"
This album documents a fascinating yet flawed live collaboration that occurred at a church in Toulouse, France in 2007 where Palestine's eerie and unpredictable pipe organ playing was processed in real-time by Montessuis and his laptop.  The result is a memorably bizarre piece that lies somewhere between complex, oscillating drone and a mad scientist blasting out cacophonous chords in his remote lair on a storm-ravaged precipice. At least, it does until Charlemagne makes the unfortunate decision to start singing.
The best thing about Charlemagne Palestine's well-known eccentricity is that I never know quite what to expect when he releases a new album, especially when other people are involved. Voxorgachitectronumputer still manages to stand out as an especially curious and counter-intuitive work, however, as I continued to have no idea what to expect up until its very last notes.
It begins somewhat unpromisingly with a sustained, quavering organ tone coupled with a shrill (almost insectoid) hum, over which Palestine starts to idly improvise.  At first, he does not stray much from the sort of stuff that would normally be played on a church organ, but his faux-sacred playing gradually becomes increasingly erratic and interrupted by jarring blurts and dissonant stabs that seem fairly random and unmusical.  Fortunately, Joachim stays quite busy, using the early part of the piece to add layers to the underlying drone, building both density and harmonic complexity.  His behind-the-scenes machinations aren't immediately obvious at first, but by the 15-minute mark, the low-end has grown deep and hollow and the oscillations have taken a tense, somewhat menacing tone.  It was around this point that I realized that I was completely sucked in and enjoying the piece enormously.
Once Joachim has enough constantly shifting layers weaved together, the piece takes on a queasily shimmering and throbbing life of its own and continues to unfold in an expected and compelling way (though Palestine nearly sabotages it a few times with unsubtle blats and noodlings).  The denser the piece grows, the more absorbing it becomes, as the drone becomes so huge and engulfing that Palestine's flurries no longer sound like harsh interruptions– they now sound like they are fighting through the roar to be heard.  Then, around the 45-minute mark, the duo pull off a neat dynamic feat: the bottom drops out, leaving the shivering nimbus of spectral, laptop-damaged microtones in the foreground.
Lamentably, however, the piece is then torpedoed by the aforementioned ghastly singing interlude: Palestine starts either loudly and nasally chanting in a foreign language or speaking in tongues and the piece is completely ruined for me. In an instant, Voxorgachitectronumputer degenerates from a bizarre drone masterwork to something approaching the worst kind of outsider art.  I realize that odd artistic decisions and puzzling behavior are part of Palestine's charm, but it almost feels like he spent the whole piece digging though his bag of tricks for the right tool to destroy it all, then narrowly managed to succeed mere moments before the end.  In reality, he was probably either caught up in the music or trying to inject some spirituality/catharsis/entropy/primal energy into the performance, but the effect is the ultimately the same whatever the intention: quite grating.
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