Dorine Muraille – Mani

Dorine Muraille is Julien Locquet, a French composer, who released an album on artefact onder the nam of Gel:, plus several 12″s on various labels. On this release Locquet is joined by the French poet Chloe Delaume. Locquets creates thick layers of sounds, by cutting up samples, and playing them in a what seems a random order. But it’s far from ramdom. Locquet reworks his source material very gently and subtle, creating a dreamy atmosphere. Think of works by Tim Hecker, Oval, and Fennesz. Most samples sound very organic, but there is always a layer of more noisy, digital sound is present. At times you will hear a clarinet surfacing form the music, then a guitar plays, or a piano. Along with the music Chloe Delaume sings and recites her poems, giving the music more structure, and giving the listener a point to focus on.

This cd should be heard alone, with your eyes closed, and nothing else to do for the night. It’s like entering one of those dreams you have when you doze off for 15 minutes in a train. Chaotic, but warm and tender at the same time.
BVGDorine Muraille is the project of Julien Locquet, a young French composer. As with all of the (ever inspiring, but sometimes quite undigestible) Fat Cat releases this music is very hard to classify. The compositions on this cd are processed songs, originally made with piano, voice, guitar and double-bass. These gentle and almost ‘postrock-ish’ songs were processed on a laptop-computer. This has resulted in highly processed compositions in which the original song element is still recognisable but in which the sounds have been transformed into glitchy, skipping fragments.

The overall impression is that of playing a damaged cd with very sweet songs on a cd player, which makes it skip back and forth. It is quite lovely actually, but very hard to listen to at the same time. It reminds me of a mixture of the more song-oriented Kranky-releases, the icelandic band Mum, combined with the digital processing of Fennesz or Oval.
TD

artist: Dorine Muraille
label: FatCat Records
details: [splinter series 05]