Tag: Igloo Magazine

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review – mirror neurons (DER) – Igloo Magazine – USA

mirror_neurons_DER

 

Mirror Neurons on DER
CD + Digital – 500

Release Date April 21, 2015
Cover xx+xy visual

Bonus Video

All orders through DER’s Bandcamp will receive an excerpt of Mirror Neurons.
Visuals :  xx+xy visuals 
Sound : France Jobin and Fabio Perletta

The lithe, almost see-through ambient of Québecoise France Jobin combines with Fabio Perletta’s fly-eyed dot matrix view of the world. The conceit of Mirror Neutrons, a term borrowed from neuroscience that boils down to the phenomena of reaction, cogitation, imitation, and above all empathy, is tested by the artists listening to and crafting each other’s sounds as they are traded between Canada and Italy. The album is part of a larger proposition including video by xx-xy visuals.

“Parallel” clicks into earshot with a slow rosary-bead count. Says nothing, almost nothing, for a bit. An electronic device warms up, its beeps as slowly as the rosary beads did. Then it begins to percolate as a thin, smooth organ-drone unfurls and puts on weight. “Reflection” begins where “Parallel” left off, with a diaphanous, quavering drone gaining heft before going silent halfway through, returning as a much more confident and sacral tone, a blast in such a quiet context. It eventually recedes to its gauzy origin. “Mimesis” is sharp-edged glitch granules hurled at the whole cloth of an attractive hum, causing it to tear. A second movement opens with the richest drone yet, all but befogging the tiniest, intermittent bubble squeak, before unfolding into a great, big smile of a drone and blinking goodbye.

Play loud—there’s really no other choice.

Stephen Fruitman

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review – 29 Palms (der) 2010 – by Allen Lockett – Igloo Magazine

29 Palms, i8u on Dragon’s Eye Recordings

Montreal-based France Jobin has been active since 1999, with albums on labels like Bake/Staalplaat, Room40, nvo, Atak, and Vague Terrain. Specializing in “sound-sculpture” in her i8u guise, she’s aided and abetted here by California’s Joshua Tree national park, whence she drew both inspiration and field recordings, edited and processed into the spatial environments of 29 Palms. Its single long format tract eschews a linear narrative in favour of ineffable dwellings and unwonted divergences; for all that it dwells on spaces it creates, its audio-visualizations constantly shift, between deeply textured dronal swells and billows and attenuated higher end microsonics – binaries that Jobin stitches together into audio tableaux that are at once evacuated and replete, expansive and intimate. Poking discreetly into the interstices of lower spectrum digital and analogue tone, softly prodding pulses and held back bass gesture, the trajectory of 29 Palms describes a event horizon onto which microvariations hove into view; ambiguous atmospheres unfolding out of a seemingly infinitely creatively configurable trio of materials – synthetic sustain, wavering tonalities and digital crackle – that commingle with occasional emergent harmonics. It rises and falls, building into whirling dirges (clip below), softening to mid-range pulse, descending into spectral sound and liminal near silence. Appeal – no soundalike reference intended – will be to those who cherish the likes of Richard Chartier through to William Basinski, to the ear that cleaves to a certain desertification, and the expressivity of absence.

 

Igloo Magazine