Brume & Edward Sol - Grey FLAC download

"For a very long time Christian Renou was known to the entire cassette world as Brume, and then, early this century for a while under his own name, but I guess sometimes one needs to stay with the old names (easier to get a record out sometimes, perhaps) and these days it is Brume again. It seems, but maybe I am just grossly misinformed, that he is these days less active when it comes to releases, certainly compared to his cassette releases in the 80s. Here however he teams up with Edward Sol, from the Ukraine, where he runs his Quasipop label, and, who knows, the Sentimental label, of which this is the first release. This is one of those 'music by mail' collaborations. On the first side Edward Sol created all the music using sounds from Brume and on the other side it's vice versa. Sol has 'treatments, reel tapes, loops, electronics, Polivoks, synth, voice' while Brume uses 'treatments and re-composition, additional sound sources, mix & voice', which in my book is just minor differences. It shows in the music too; one has to turn the record over, so you know someone else is responsible for the mix, but in all of the ten pieces on this record there is not a lot of difference in approaches. All of these pieces are dark and textured pieces of treated sound, with quite some loops running around at the same time, some of these slowed down and all of this going through a whole bunch of sound effects, to create some intense sound patterns. Sometimes one ecognizes an instrument, a guitar or saxophone in 'Short Harvest', but most of the times the sources are very hard to decipher. Spooky music with a strong cinematic approach, as I can see this easily fit a horror movie. Musique concrete of a rather modern nature. Densely orchestrated, short and to the point, exactly how we like those things. This album is already a very limited edition release, but in an even more limited edition there is also a bonus CDR, called 'Fade To Grey', and is recorded by Edward Sol, solely, taking the material a notch or two further. It's a single piece, just a minute longer than the original LP and taking all the elements into a new context, again allvery spooky and mysterious. This is the kind of stuff where you only have to add the film to the music; it's allthere already. I think this is a particular strong piece on it's own and it deserves to be heard outside thelimitation of twenty copies only. Maybe there should be a proper CD version that goes with each LP, or perhapseven a separate release on it's own? Excellent head trip/space music from the world of musique concrete."Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly #1018