Kaspar is a delightful album, offering 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 of sounds of all kinds, a concern for narrative, 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 to split the multiple and colorful waves of these thirteen tracks, all very distinctive.

Their sometimes old-fashioned sonorities enchant us, as in the "Phases" (1) and phase shifts that open the disc, as if the Steve Reich of seminal works were meeting Pierre Schaeffer's first closed grooves in a museum of "concrete" antiquities, but without any superfluous dust or cobwebs; or through the loops of analog synthesis that spin merrily in "Toupies" (2); or plunged into the mesmerizing 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. Then there's the long meditation and upward spiral of "Feux" (7), starting with the sputtering of vinyl and unfolding in wefts of sizzle and hiss; and then the surprisingly swaying polyrhythm of "Sofa" (10), with its almost trance-like tones. The last three tracks are the object of longer, more structured electroacoustic deployments: "Fragment" (11), when the sound material begins to live on its own and 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 highly polished, more contemporary computer processing procedures: end of journey, everyone off...

Flavors 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.

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Discover the album on kaspar-music. com

Guillaume Kosmicki