ARANDEL - Aleae

The Arandel project, shrouded as it is in mystery, belongs to that wide array of attempts to grant techno the dignity of art music, a scene too often relegated to a limbo closer to nightclub racket than to attentive, conscious listening. He's neither the first nor the only one to undertake such an endeavour; one need only recall, in recent years, albums by musicians like Kangding Ray, Paul Kalkbrenner, Trentemøller, all the way up to true composers like Alva Noto and Mika Vainio, who have carried into the techno world ideas drawn from the avant-garde, whether that of the Darmstadt school or that of American minimalism.

French, little or nothing is known about him; to keep the music front and centre he has concealed both his face – perpetually hidden behind a mask – and his name. In his rare statements, however, Arandel is keen to say (via his official website) that he draws inspiration from the French literary critic Roland Barthes and his notion of the “Death of the Author”, an idea that sharply separates the work of art from the artist who conceived it, as though the work – once created – takes on a life of its own, to the point that knowing the life and inspirations of its creator becomes irrelevant.

What we do know are his albums, which have always carried Terry Riley's mystical minimalism into the world of contemporary electronic music. He did so from the very start with his debut “In D” (2010), which references the Californian master right in its title (an allusion to the seminal “In C”); he kept doing so with the subsequent trilogy of “Solarispellis” (2014), “Umbrapellis” (2015) and “Extrapellis” (2016), with which he drew closer to the more mystical Terry Riley of “A Rainbow In Curved Air”; these three albums – rich in evocative, cinematic moments – still stand today as his most significant work.

The new “Aleae” thrives on a range of shifts, moving from post-minimalism to the Oren Ambarchi -like sound of “Aleae I” and “Aleae II”, both examples of an almost academic minimalism that is nonetheless consistently well-crafted. “Alaea III”, by contrast, is unexpected, and feels more like a resounding flop, better suited to an Ibiza beach club than to a project as worthy as Arandel.

To salvage an album that had so far said little, the final two tracks arrive; “Aleae IV” is the most dreamlike track, with ethereal patterns repeating and scattering over one another. There's Riley, but there's also ambient music, there's dispersion and pathos, suspension from reality and modernity. No less striking are parts of the thirteen minutes that close “Aleae V”, which wrap up with quasi-cosmic flows worthy of Vangelis's cinematic work on “Blade Runner“, enriched by obsessive techno rhythms; the latter, in truth, seem to strip away atmosphere rather than add to it, ending up as mere filler.

If Arandel's career had up to now been a steady crescendo – peaking with the remarkable 2014-2016 trilogy – it seems that “Aleae” marks a first stumble in his creative abilities; we'll see what the near future holds.

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21/02/2017