AMUTE - Some Rest

After another artistic high point, “Bending Time In Waves” (2016), Jerome Deuson, aka Amute, finds new ambitions on “Some Rest”. The title suite itself, “Some Rest”, is ambitious above all, juxtaposing almost improvised gothic chamber music, soft-psychedelia Pink Floyd-isms, drones that start out Indian-inflected and then turn noisy, then a “modern dance” of glimmering dissonances and vocalizations, and finally an impeccable noise-rock sortie. Halfway between flow and polyptych, Deuson perhaps loses some cohesion here, aside from the shared denominator of an at-most funereal, oppressive mood.

In the remaining tracks Deuson discovers, or rediscovers, chamber-tronica, from the cinematic “Lost In The Middle” to “I’ve Seen It All”, opened by a post-Terry Riley electronic wreckage amplified by an abstract vocal. The contribution of sound-designer Christophe Bailleau is also strongly felt on “The Obsedian”, velvety and tribally insistent, overrun by electro-cacophonous bursts.

Deuson also rediscovers words on two spatial ballads, “Maria” and “Dead Cold”, which retrace the Anglo-Irish tradition, from David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, to Syd Barrett’s vanished madness, to the ultrasonic crackle of Jason Pierce and Kevin Shields.

Hushed and anxious as a whole, the French composer's seventh album rests, more than on the music itself, on an even split with marked symbolic and, by extension, meta-musical, even discographic meaning: the long, final title track, a peremptory link to his past, a great “no trespassing” that closes out a creative period in style, and the short tracks, graceful, gentle hints of the future with a touch of the avant-garde. Few, well-chosen and purposeful guests, foremost among them cellist Thècle Joussaud.

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22/06/2018