Jean-François Laporte
Soundmatters
23Five 2007

01. Électro-Prana
02. Boule Qui Roule...
03. Dans le Ventre du Dragon
04. Mantra
05. La Plénitude du Vide

Seriously out of words for how deep, expressive and intelligent Soundmatters is. If any beings of the cosmos were to hear the sounds humans & their environments produce, they would simply have to hear this album. Call it "music", but really it's an entity within itself. We are all some "matter" after all - nothing is predefined. The same matter that makes you and me, and stars and galaxies - at least that's what 'Mantra' made me think about, a 26-min monster built around the use of an electric air compressor. Top pick of the month, and I can't imagine many records touching Jean-François Laporte's stroke of brilliance.

>> gsize / fsend (146mb) (d-_-b)
>> love it, buy it (Helen Scarsdale)

Sufi mystics tend to exclaim that vibration acts as the key to the order of the universe. Every entity vibrates at a certain frequency and human beings possess the unusual capacity to tune themselves up or down. That said, the medium is all but invisible to the subject submerged in it, the water is unknown to the fish until it tastes the air, and so Jean-François Laporte aims to provide a tonic for this delirium, pulling one out of this bee's nest of sounds and placing one into a controlled yet spontaneous environment in which one may identify and "tune-in" to these vibrations, to these mantras which are mouthed by commonplace objects everyday.

The first composition focuses on a house perched in Montreal which was haunted by a succession of ice storms during the winter of '98. One hears wind whistling through creaky doors creating a palpable hum of tension, rattling windowpanes emitting tones which are layered and slither wormlike, gliding over one another as they thicken and thin the music. Without any processing or effects, 'Dans le Ventre du Dragon' was conducted inside an empty cargo hull stuck in the belly of a pensioned-off ship. The hull takes the dimly glowing tones from the Quasar Saxophone Quartet into its maw and emits a pall of reverberating, nocturnal timbres. As homage to the "simple" and the near-nothing, 'La Plénitude du Vide' shows a fine ear for pitch and continuity, building from the most miniscule of rustles, chirrups, and flutters from the bowls of a saxophone and the beating of aluminum tubes to develop naturally into a glowering, low rumbling drone, pregnant with unexpected, long resonant spans of harmony, which overflow and animate the once barren womb of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste church in Montreal. Moksha might not lie in wait, yet these recordings possess the curious ability to rearrange the fields of self. -Max Schaefer