Yerri-Gaspar HummelKaspar

Records 09.09.2021

Kaspar is a delightful album that offers the listener a refreshing and erudite archaeological dive, without didacticism, into all the best that electronic music has to offer in its eighty-year history.

With a sensitive ear, a blatant love for sounds of all kinds, a concern for narration, a passion for sampling, synthesis and loops, and above all a perfect mastery of electronic languages, Yérri-Gaspar Hummel firmly holds the helm and guides our ears in order to split the multiple and coloured waves of these thirteen tracks, all of which are very typical.

Their sometimes old-fashioned sonorities enchant us, for example the "Phases" (1) and phase shifts that open the record, as if the Steve Reich of the seminal works met Pierre Schaeffer's first closed grooves in a museum of "concrete" antiquities, but without any superfluous dust or cobwebs; or through the loops of analogical synthesis that spin merrily in "Toupees" (2); or plunged into the bewitching gears that form the mechanics of "R.aube" (3). The sampled cordophones of "Lueur" seem to invent a new folklore on virtual lutherie (4), while "Japash" (6) proposes a new vocality and "FeuXL" a kind of study on percussion. There is also the long meditation and the ascending spiral of "Feux" (7), starting from the sputtering of the vinyl to unfold in wefts all of sizzling or hissing; and then the surprising polyrhythmic swaying of "Sofa" (10), with its almost trance-like sounds. The last three tracks are the object of longer and more structured electroacoustic deployments: "Fragment" (11), when the sound matter starts to live on its own and to proliferate; "(F)ragile territories" (12), an ethnographic railway journey with a field recording flavour, in the worthy wake of Luc Ferrari; and then "Check point" (13) and its very careful computer processing, more contemporary: end of the journey, everyone gets off...

Flavours of musique concrète, repetitive music, drone music, industrial music, noise, soundscapes, techno and ambient run through the whole record, which nevertheless bears the obvious signature of a beautiful and sincere musical personality.

Selected excerpts:

Discover the record on kaspar-music. com

Guillaume Kosmicki

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