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"Veering from fractured hyperpop into deconstructed club oddness and ambience, this album is a restless and rewarding experience that will delight fans of the Orange Milk catalogue and the stranger corners of Oneohtrix Point Never’s discography." (https://soundcloud.com/djmag)
"Time and time again, we have found ourselves lost in this album. A potent stew of element we’d possible not normally enjoy tumbling in space with sections we wish continued into far longer expanses." (Obladada)
On Organe Solaire (GEN051) by https://soundcloud.com/amselysen a coherent ensemble is presented consisting of digital, hyperprocessed textures, minuscule sound fragmentations and impassioned, pressing vocal broadcasts. Deceptively, the sound at intermittently even approaches something like a sugary sweet pop production: chord stabs, piano tones, heartfelt howling, energetic kicks, the whole works. The most powerful weapons in the electro-acoustic toolkit are used here: sound events occur on a microscopic scale, sliced, granulated, pitch-bent, resonant, bubbling, stretching - but at the same time have an impactful, cinematic, piercing quality. From the arrangement point of view there is a cryptic multi-centered, restless logic, with the trajectory of all tracks constantly getting out of balance, twisting, self-subverting. The human voice, or the remnants of it, form an important thread through this album; spanning a wide tonal, textural range, the voice material is sometimes vocoded, stuttering, crushed, resampled, fried, totally pushed beyond its limits; but at other times innately performative, assertive - a declaration of intent or active intervention, conveying meaning, communicating something important. Organe solaire follows 2020's murky transmission Hypnagogic Surge.
/ Hakeem Lapointe (https://soundcloud.com/amselysen) about GEN051
“My [Amselysen’s] second full length album’s focus, Organe Solaire, strays from conceptual music and goes on dissecting and splaying a dark but colourful sludge of emotions. A major point source in my compositional approach to the record has been imagining the trajectory of hyper-pop if it evolved with a more pessimistic tendency, with the same bells and whistles, but less shiny and squeaky clean — like the rainbow reflections of tar bubbles.
Organe Solaire, unable to afford being cryptic, doubles down on honest, raw lyricism and is quick to open up, building a comprehensive musical and gestural language that reflects the narratives behind each and every track. They range from slow suicidal ballads, to demented hyper-melancholic pop, to interludes containing heavy narratives, like Discrepancies (for Kellyanne): a heavily filtered piano composition dating from my late teens, also acting as a hope to reach out to a long lost then-best friend.
I did not shy away at referencing personal idols who’ve inspired me throughout the years: The Labour of Love samples Akira Fuse’s Shikuramen No Kahori, a song mentioned in Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko’s feature length film Kuro, and matches its theme: gazing at the afterimage of a romance long gone. Post-modern Tsunami, as outlined by “shoutout to Hito Steyerl”, is made to the image of Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc.: in its wave-like structure; in its senseless meme aesthetic; and nods at its conceptual approach, dissecting contemporary culture with economic undertones.
To aid me in my efforts, I have called upon two outstanding collaborators to lend their strengths on the album. I’ve recruited the excellent Ubu Boi, providing tactful compositions and solid vocal performances, and the mysterious 2x|n, a.k.a. Seraphim, for precise sound design and incisive aural interventions.
Delving into romantic torment, drug use, artistic frustrations, struggles with mental illness, Organe Solaire brings forth a fundamentally human experience in the form of raw edges thinly veiled under a layer of gloss.”
- Genre
- Electronic