Here at OBLADADA, we have a policy of sorts that’s only to write about music we love. Based on the assumption that our world is already swamped by so much negativity, who needs another faceless entity taking creativity worded pot shots at some music we happened not to enjoy?
Sometimes we find albums that simply are not our thing. The album embalmed deep within Amselysen’s new release Organe Solaire may possibly have headed in this direction.
Whilst a polished pop sensibility is within touching distance throughout much of this new album’s lifespan here, it is wrapped under, and torn apart by surprisingly spiky heaving electronics. An album as a series of curveballs that continually suggest one thing whilst doing the opposite. The surface here is way beyond any chart music sheen, into a fractured spectral headphonic trip, hyper-pop as the label suggests.
Amselyen expertly wraps high resolution ballads, songs, rants and ideas into bizarre eruptions and splinters. Songs explode with milliseconds notice, and sonic wormholes open and close without fanfare.
You get the sense that much here could have been gathered into some sort of sumptuous and way more balanced pop. But thankfully to our more experimentally focussed ears, even more than some aggressive remixing process, these songs have been brutally sculpted into barely recognisable forms and textures.
Amselyen is a Canadian musician and sound designer and whilst their name is new to us, it is relieving that a previous album was called Hypnogogic Surge. As Organe Solaire fans out we are treated to a 4k re-imagining of James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual with some woozy sprinkled chaos from Eric Copland’s Alien In A Garbage Dump.
The opener Cyclamen flits between autotuned reflections and ruptures, Milky Visage forms a nightmarish stream of consciousness before aligning into a late-night banger. Post-Modern Tsumani is an acerbic mangle of memes and metadata. Discrepancies (for Kellyanne) is 2 minutes of monolithic acid-etched ambience that could easily roll for days…
The Labour of Love (feat. 2x|n) is a slice of orchestral strings pulled through a bank of effects leading to the lopsided, blissed out highpoint of My True Faith.
By this point it’s clear Organe Solaire refuses the listener to ever accurately assume what happens next. Amselyen’s production and sound design continues to pull the rug from under you, like the music is constantly being sabotaged from within.
10fold is a violent admission of paranoia and Elation is a joyous theme to some day-glo computer game. Jaded, Disenchanted dissolves the voice into a distorted tape dragging moiré. Mornes Confusion and Misery (feat. Ubu Boi) both walk the thin ice over complete chaos. The closer Solarize (Ketamine) is a delirious hallucinatory mess that trails off into calming silence.
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.
Organe Solaire is a stunning example of music that’s somehow poised at the very edge of different worlds that initially wrong footed us. That sense that somehow, we would get channelled or processed into crystallised pop never came.
Here we have a strobe lit flythrough of Amelyen’s hyperactive brain, clearly comfortable shuffling through endless genres but always aware each moment acts as a springboard into wild hairpin bends.
Organ Solaire is out on cassette and digital, on 23 October from Genot Centre
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