Drone Records

BRUME - Two Characters

Format: 10inch

Label & Cat.Number: Substantia Innominata SUB-19

Release Year: 2013

Note: the French "atmospheric musique concrete" master on the Drone Rec.-sublabel with two highly evocative drone-pieces, full of tension & great sounds, showing a compelling densification process.. lim. 500 coloured vinyl; cover-artwork by MAL HOESCHEN (MULTER) OUT NOW !!

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €12.00

More Info

"Through more than 25 years of existence, the French composer CHRISTIAN RENOU, aka BRUME, has developed a unique 'handwriting' style within the experimental underground, something one may call "atmospheric Musique concrète". It is the marriage of many concrete sounds, hand-played acoustic instruments and electronic drones / noises that are arranged in a manner somewhat akin to a "narrative" - highly emotive and often evolving in a dramatic way. We are delighted to have received two tracks for the Substantia Innominata series that are simply extraordinary: expressing the wordless, indescribable oscillations arising from mental states, the qualia and conditions of two fictional 'souls', the aura of a personality.
Compounded by electronics (synths), field recordings (door jarring, water), alto sax, gramophone, tapes, various processed voices, percussion, bass, home-made instruments, both 'characters' start as a rather smooth ambient pieces that develop & expand into orchestral, mysterious post-industrial entities, showing a compelling process of densification.
Lim. 500 copies on lovely coloured vinyl (mixed blue, white & black), artwork by Mal Hoeschen (MULTER)." [label info]

www.substantia-innominata.de

"One of the things I like about Drone Records sub-division Substantia Innominata is that it doesn't exclusively deals with the darker than dark drone/ambient music which one would maybe expect from a series of 'works inspired by or related to "the unknown" around or within us. There is also room for sound collage, such as with RLW, Column One and perhaps to a lesser extent Illusion Of Safety. Not always the most obvious names and Brume is another one of those less obvious names, I would think. Christian Renou has been active since close to thirty years and in his early years was active with releasing cassettes, in the early 90s a bunch of CDs and in the last decade or so a bit more sparse with releases (or perhaps it has moved out of my sight?). In the old days his sound theory seemed 'no silence please', and using electronics in a very raw sort of musique concrete manner. On his new record, he uses "electronics (synths), field recordings (door jarring, water), alto sax, gramophone,
tapes, various processed voices, discreet percussion, discreet bass and home made instruments. He paints portraits of two characters, as indicated by the title of the record, and the two pieces, 'Zaklasta-re the beautiful' and 'Glazüük, the dreamer'. In the first the beautiful is unveiled through some dark drones, which move dark and majestically, whereas on top we hear occasionally the alto-saxophone, wailing about, in and out of the mix. This is a fine piece, more ambient and drone like perhaps then you'd expect from Brume, but the saxophone and the occasional electronic sounds add a certain weirdness to the piece. The other side is perhaps less dreamy than it would suggest, and moves in various places, maybe an uneasy night rest? It's in the second half of the piece that we land into a dreamy world via controlled feedback and reverb, and before that, perhaps more the uneasy REM sleep? Here we find voices slipping in and out of the mix; another sign of musique concrete past. An excellent record. It made me lean towards my CD collection and pick some older works of Brume to play in the more quiet hours of the evening." [FdW/Vital Weekly]

"One of many characters in the whole post-industrial diaspora who we have not really carried in part due to the difficulty in getting a hold of many of Brume's releases on small European imprints and in part due to not knowing where to start, especially with a catalog that tracks somewhere around 100 releases over 25 years. So, we'll take our cue from Drone Records and their Subtantia Innominata series of 10"s for this introduction into the woolly musique concrete and viral electronics from the French artist Christian Renou. His is a very creepy type of sound design with B-side backmasking, nightmarish vocals all laced throughout atonal, sci-fi tension, squiggled radiophonic explorations, and dark ambient swells, it's almost a cross between the incidental moments of the Logan's Run soundtrack and Coil's Musick To Play In The Dark. The A-side situates a low-end thrumming that's all brooding and ominous in the Svarte Greiner and Deathprod means of shadow-sound manipulation; but out of nowhere comes a crushed horn that's probably a saxophone, but sounds way more like a Tibetan horn with an unkempt scratchiness and apocalyptic fervor made all the more evident through a slow and heavy mechanical iron-on-stone hammering that brings this track to its definitive end." [Aquarius Records]