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It might be easy to think about this, Jeck's seventh solo release, as marking a maturation or a refinement of the artist's sound, but that analysis cheapens the singular vision he's established over the past years. Sure, he arrived in the wake of Christian Marclay's ground-breaking turntable explorations, after groups like Zoviet France had set the bar for grainy, delay-ridden loopscapes, but Jeck has, since his beginnings, created some of the most distinctive music to emerge from either turntablist or ambient traditions.Touch
He is peerless in his ability to wrest absolutely transporting, surreal textures from little more than the grooves of a few dozen records, working in a way that exposes the primitive quality of the medium almost in conjunction with, or in spite of, the hallucinogenic displacements achieved in the music. With Jeck this is never an uncomfortable experience, as the majority of his compositions lead to places awash in the same golden light and aquatic splendor that fill his Wozencroft-designed sleeves, but when it's best, Jeck's music is as riveting as it is meditative or nostalgic. Fragments of vinyl crackle and machine hum get amplified, distorted, and piled together, making static slopes that are often quicker to pummel than to caress (see "Skew" from Jeck's other new release, Host). Other prized moments find Jeck throwing truly alien records into the mix; most memorable for me are the vocals copped from some moaning gospel singer(?) that appear on 2002's enchanting Stoke, slowed down and otherwise manipulated to simulate a kind of divine response. Moments like these show the artist taking risks that remain largely absent on 7, making it an under-whelming listen. While there are many beautiful sections throughout the disc, Jeck does little to separate himself from the droning masses. Like most of his recordings, 7 was produced live, an impressive feat, especially since signs of artifice are now at an all-time low. Here, Jeck approaches a sound where all surface noises, tone-arm shivers, and loop outlines disappear in service of the whole, but the polished, perfectly integrated result comes off lacking much of what made his music so interesting before. Several of the tracks build on simple patterns or pale, one-dimensional drones, allowing for only subtle transformation over their (relatively) short lengths. 7 could be Jeck's most understated work yet, and the music is, of course, not without merit. Tracks like "Some Pennies" come close to rivaling the artist's previous work, but nothing here has the potential to invigorate, much less summarize or redefine an already impressive body of work. Those looking for a Jeck fix might have more luck with his newer, more eventful release, Host.
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- Michael Patrick Brady
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- Taylor McLaren
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- Andrew Culler
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MIO continues what's looking like a campaign to reissue all the lost gems of the Nurse With Wound list with this long-forgotten and seminal document of the French progressive scene. Birgé Gorgé Shiroc were Jean-Jacques Birgé, Francis Gorgé, and Shiroc before the first two formed the flagship prog collective Un Drame Musical Instantane. Recorded in 1975, Défense de is their only record under the BGS moniker, entering the arms of obscurity only one year before Un D.M.I. became active. As such, the record paints a picture of the Birgé and Gorgé in an early stage of their development, but one that was already overflowing with good ideas.
The music is highly improvisational with strong ties to the free jazz and fusion of the day, made progressive almost single-handedly through Birgé's obsession with bizarre synthesizer sounds and his ability to incorporate a huge variety of exotic instruments, toys, tapes, even birdcalls into the mix. Much of the album sounds like Crossings/Sextant-era Herbie Hancock with a gritty, psychedelic edge where simmering, minimal passages get broken up by clustered freak-outs instead of nimble funk turns. At under 45-min., Défense de needed a little padding for reissue, and MIO has been more than generous. To the CD they've added a bonus half-hour of album-session outtakes, and the package also includes a DVD with six hours worth of home tapes and live material, plus a 40-min. film by Birg? and film school friend Bernard Mollerat called La Nuit Du Phoque ("The Night of the Seal"). Predictably, this previously-unreleased music, dubbed collectively "The June Sessions," explains Stapleton's fondness for the group much better than the album, the only thing he could have possibly heard. They show BGS at their most adventurous, dabbling in everything from murky, proto-industrial textures, to Fripp-ian guitar ascensions, to the extended, vague takes on music drama that inform their work as Un D.M.I. The band's wide-open approach to constructing their multi-layered compositions is no doubt what attracted Stapleton's ear, and these sessions make available near-exhausting investigations into the group's "process." The film is good too, a hilarious Dadaist trip through Paris and surrounding environs, with English subtitles and a score that isolates Birgé's more ambient, textural approach to synthesizer and organ sound. The enormity of this reissue is enough to guarantee its appeal to fans of prog-anything, and admirers of Un Drame Musical Instantane will be shocked that a cache this large has eluded them for so long. 
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Personally, I don't care if I never hear another pompous album of under-written, overblown mediocrity from these unshaven, ponytailed bores. But Sam Shalabi has always been a separate proposition from the unappetizing uniformity of much of the Montreal scene, his material showing a bit more personality and a greater sphere of influence, incorporating psychedelic rock and ethnic textures into his dark, jazz-inflected music. Pink Abyss is billed as Shalabi Effect's first pop album, a claim which doesn't really stick, but the retro-baroque Curt Boettcher stylings of "Blue Sunshine" come very close, even if it is eventually upstaged by a squall of gurgling hashish-filtered electronics. The album's highlight comes early, the sexy jazz of "Bright Guilty World," an adaptation of "Bali Hai" from South Pacific, which changes the lyrics into an indictment of the imperialist policies of George W. Bush. The silky vocals of guest Elizabeth Anka Vajagic evoke the sultry smolder of Sara Vaughan and the exotic intrigue of Yma Sumac, though I find it rather distressing that the liner notes give no indication that the track is a cover of a classic Rogers and Hammerstein song. "Iron and Blood" is a slowly simmering folk-improv jam, which incorporates tabla and a beautifully anthemic guitar solo. It's in the region of bands like Sunburned Hand of the Man, but it's better produced and pulled off with a lot more panache. Successive tracks use the same instrumentation and techniques, but are able to achieve varied results which mostly succeed. "Kinder Surprise" takes a cue from pastoral psychedelic acts like Boards of Canada, with its pacific washes of analog synthesizer and samples of frolicking children. It's not very original, but it makes for a gentle coda to a quietly charming and accomplished album.
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