Another multi-layered journey from Montréal's Vincent Bergeron, "Il y a seulement des apparitions" continues his exploration of cutup mixing techniques and his own idiosyncratic singing. The result is a rich "spasmacousmatic" experience, a surreal engagement with Bergeron's musical collaborators and the themes he grapples with.
Here is Mr. Bergeron writing about this project:
"I always thought the way music composers put together stories and music to be really formally rigid, often using much more restricted structures, submitting the instrumental parts to the vocals for boring
practical reasons.
Around wide opened electroacoustic sounds, most just ask a low voice narrator or poet/writer to read from start to end the whole text with a steady and efficient voice that most listeners will automatically
enjoy. It sounds more like a trick lifted from classical cinema vocabulary.
There is always an important element that is neglected, it handicaps the music heavily because of tired traditions that are too anchored in the brains. It makes me sad because I am a great lover of music with
lyrical vocals but I almost never hear fully developed compositions with vocals that truly make me feel emotionally involved.
In all my vocal works, I attempt to obtain more musical fluidity and freedom with the vocals, at the risk of losing the sterile understanding of the lazy consumer. Here, it is a third attempt to integrate a storytelling method that was directly inspired by my music composition – listen to Philosophie Fantasmagorique (2007) and Le savant devait arriver... (2008) for compacted versions where the story
was almost meant to crumble behind the music.
I believe in a new spontaneity and emotional urgency within these songs. The story was taking a supportive role to my most patient music, when selecting the lyrics. The story still exists as another life,
for the reader who understands French."
----V.B.
artist website:
www.freakywaves.com/vb/Vincent/music.htm
label website:
spectropol.com
"...Vincent Bergeron, the unbelievable UFO of Post-Modern Quebec. This new opus out on US label Spectropol is true to his work: music made of bits of sampled music culled here, there and everywhere (and occasionally submitted by guest musicians), whose assemblage follows hermetic rules (there is no doubt that this artistic process is the product of a deep, ongoing reflection). The music integrates a poem/story, and Bergeron’s delivery is reminiscent in part of Harry Partch’s speech-singing..." - François Couture