Pierre Bastien - Mechanoid
I used to own one of Pierre Bastien's earlier records, I believe it was Musiques Paralloïdres, and I never really clicked to its hypnotic beauty. Listening to the second track of his new record, Mechanoid, I am reminded of that previous outing with the prepared trumpet that sings softly over the repetitive loop of the old blues record. Bastien has built an orchestra of robots, using the raw materials of meccano (somewhat similar to an erector set) to craft machines that either operate traditional instruments or simply play a lock groove from an old record, and Mechanoid collects ten pallindromatic efforts of his mechanical aptitude. Some are melodious (like the above-mentioned track "Revolt Lover"), while others fill the room with their alien rhythms. "No Eon" fills your head like you've just miked the entire circulatory system of a whale and are having it piped directly into your skull. "Gnu lung" lurches and chugs along like a water-powered, steam-driven hurdy-gurdy. "Deep Speed" runs along like an out-of-control flatbed truck, its brakes squealing occasionally, a pallet of metronomes still attached to its bed, with a wild-eyed saxophonist behind the wheel. "Rev over" waits at the stoplight, its engine running, the bleak notes of its horn coloring the late afternoon air. Bastien fabricates landscapes with his machines, strange resonant environments he calls "mechanica" and "acoustica," off-kilter labels which mesh surprisingly well to describe the sound of his records.
As a label, Rephlex makes what they call "braindance" music and the underlying scholium is one of complexity, of fragmentary elements combining in non-traditional ways, of sounds that touch regions of your head that don't quite know how to react to such stimuli. Bastien's work, with its generative and non-organic nature, is clearly comfortable with this paradigm. And the listener is much better off the sooner he or she can get with this program. So, sit back, open up your head, touch the hard spots that have been forming on your hypothalamus, and let Bastien's tiny machines go to work on your brain. It'll feel a little like someone is pulling your strings at first, but that's normal: when your brain first begins to dance, the rest of your body has to catch up.
Pierre Bastien
Rephlex Records [2001]
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