[VLEK15] Aymeric de Tapol - Winter Dance
http:vlek15.vlekdata.org
Out April 21st - Distributed Worldwide by Kompakt.
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The Brussels-based Aymeric de Tapol is a prolific producer of audio across styles and mediums.His output is dizzyingly diverse - last year’s Méridiens Tape was constructed from field recordings made in Senegal, Mali and Istanbul; 2012’s Talking With A Dinosaur was a collection of volatile synth experiments; as one quarter of Zoho you’ll find him sculpting visceral walls of noise at a show near you. With Winter Dance, however, he’s found a sound that’s perfectly at home on Vlek.
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These six mossy drone compositions seem to reflect de Tapol’s interest in “climatic” music: their ingredients are simple but there is a real sense of space and life to them, as if the producer has not created them so much as simply captured them in their natural habitat. Sounds blossom, proliferate and die away, their surfaces cracked and pitted with the everyday detritus of life; even the uncanniest moments have a strangely comforting warmth to them.
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‘Danse D’Hiver’ and ‘Temple Gauche’ are the centrepieces, lengthier drone compositions which gradually swell to majestic proportions. Like some kind of swarming event, the massed form is impressive, but it’s also rich with surface activity - you’ll find yourself becoming absorbed in the tiny curlicues of sound as they dance past your ears. Elsewhere, de Tapol proves himself to be adept at conjuring a range of tones and atmospheres. ‘Rue, Snow Is Falling’ is appropriately chilly; ‘Soleil Levant’ is a billowing cloud of sound.
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The forms and patterns of nature are never far from view. The title of ‘Future Flute’ presumably refers to the breathy tones that play across its surface, but they sound more like the murmur of distant wind than any man-made instrument. And ‘Lumiere D’Hotel’ is meditative music for forest floors; listening to its grainy tones loop and shimmer, you can just picture the dead leaves crumbling in timelapse, transforming into lifegiving loam that nourishes the trees to produce new leaves… and on and on it goes.