REVISIO: Megabasse | Au royaume de Pacheco

Deciding what to listen to takes you from a staggeringly large number of possibilities and zone in on just one. If what you’ve chosen is brand new to your ears, you hit play and step into the unknown. You’ve granted some sort of control and trust in the artist to set a scene, and then invited to explore it for the duration of that recording. You form a relationship with what unfurls, sometimes switching off after 10 seconds, or in the case of Au royaume de Pacheco by Megabasse – looping for days on end.

Au royaume de Pacheco was one of those recent purchases we chanced upon during a long chin stroking meander through Bandcamp. The cool geometric sleeve, slightly off-kilter typography and the promise of two almost 40-minute-long sides of music, qualified the album for further exploration.

The album captures Pierre Bujeau in what appears to be two simply presented side long live cuts, all centred on patterned chiming guitar gently enmeshed within a vail of warm electronics. The effect immediately transported us back to some reconfigured facet of Fripp and Eno’s Evening Star.

Face A quickly growing outwards in patterned light beams and reflections. The gentlest of guitar soars, drawing out a sense of interlocking forward propulsion. Whilst the entire landscape is revealed in the opening 30 seconds, over the next 40 minutes, quickly becomes both essential and magnetic.

Face B is every bit as effective, this time with slightly more heft and dusted in disorientating wooze as other layers peek and dive through the mesh. Surprisingly things divide into a third track for the final 13 minutes. Shapeshifted into dulcimer chimes, before slowly melting into droning smears, and finally, gently attempting to finding the ground again in unadorned guitar.

The cumulative effect feels like drifting through a crystallised mandala.

Whilst Pacheco in the title might be a person or place, it’s a word which can be used for someone stoned on marijuana in Spanish. Coincidence or not, the long and perhaps initially static stretches of this music quickly reveal they are anything but. Whatever state you might choose to enjoy this music, it’s never failed to blissfully contract and expand in beautiful head bending ways. 

Pierre Bujeau is also member of Omertà and Tanz Mein Herz and whilst we have only just dipped our toes into the latters superb epic zones of Quattro and folky droning grooves of Une autre version de Territory, this all feels like a place to hang out indefinitely. However, for the uninitiated, Au royaume de Pacheco feels like the perfect access point into this heady and potent cache of music.

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Au royaume de Pacheco is out now on Mascarpone Discos, available on limited edition casstte and digitally.