CHAIN D.L.K – France Jobin

LINE_075 | CD + Digital | limited edition of 400 | February 2016

Electronic music composers get portrayed or portray themselves as icy mannequins, ataractic or ghostly entities or robotic hybrids. Even if there’s always a reason of similar (self)portraits and more or less aware representations, a certain humanity could look like a disrupting element of such a cliche, particularly when the technical canon seems coherent to a desired idea of excellence. When Montreal-based minimalist composer and sound artist France Jobin will gradually make her way into your eardrums, she doesn’t opt for brute attacks or epic introduction, but she lets a glimmering breathe of piano tones and light electronic buzzes peep out by a strategy that you’ll be tempted to label as shy. But such a shyness got matched to a grace, that is going to magnetically attract towards her surprisingly interesting sonic world, where sonic particles gently flow till the moment they sound like sparkling a significant process in a rarefied environment. France’s way to organize these fascinating sonic particles seems to have been inspired by quantum physics: in her own words, “quantum physics inspires me to draw a parallel between the fundamental building blocks of physics, sounds and music. I put field recordings through a series of editing and manipulation processes which result in very different sounds from their origins. These manipulations affect time, timbre, harmonics and the essence of each sound, whereas composition influences how they relate to each other.”. I don’t really know how these scientific matters influenced her sound, but I’m pretty sure that she managed to find a path by which minimal electronic music can gracefully sound even more immersive than over-stuffed sonic outputs.

Vito Camarretta

The Illusion of Infinitesimal CD Baskaru

If some sonic diggers accidentally begin to listen to this album by Montreal-based sound installation/artist and minimalist composer France Jobin aka I8U without knowing anything about its conceptual aspect, I’m pretty sure some of them could surmise that a maladroit nipper foolishly forgot to calibrate input controls on mixer while listening the opening track “1/2” where just some delicate frequencies, high beeps (not so different from pure tones for audiometric tests) and thin piercing sounds cross the microscopic holes left by knitted pad-synths which got intentionally mastered at a very low volume and seem to act like a filter for unnecessary and maybe unwanted sonic intrusions. According to a different way of listening the same track, you could imagine it’s like an unobtrusive diaphragm between listeners and surrounding world, that you keep on feeling whether you are wearing headphones or you are listening to it from loudspeakers, where just some delicate sonic entities occasionally detach from the above-mentioned stream of frequencies as if “1/2” tries to render moments of temporary partinf from “outer world”. Even the only trace of noise on the second part of the suite doesn’t get under your skin as it rather resembles the noise of distant engines (a car, a watercraft, a helicopter o maybe a tractor) when you are on a desolate beach at dawn. A similar route between barely audible loops to resurfacing sonic entities has been followed on the other two long-lasting suites: whereas the central track “0” could evoke a peaceful reverie in a countryside farm, this talented Canadian woman pulls the initial pure tones and bleeps out of the sonic sphere before letting that previously almost silenced drone wrap the listener into a warmer embrace on the final “+1”. That’s a very good rapture in the fertile plot of minimalist ambient.

Vito Camarretta

CHAIN D.L.K

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singulum LINE_075 – CHAIN D.L.K – (USA-Italy)

review – the illusion of infinitesimal – (baskaru) 2014 – CHAIN D.L.K. – NY