L Pierre - 'Touchpool' (Melodic)
3/5
By: JJ Florio
By far our most excitable element to the modern instrumental jazz genre is the titles that tracks are given. Some recent personal favourites: 'Losing Your Mobiles', 'Crazy, Crazy, Crazy You' and the quite unforgettable 'Dark Side of Mr Flumpy'. Probably a good thing the titles have nothing at all to do with the music. Otherwise we'd have a whole heap of numbers called 'My Alto Saxophone Sounds Like a Dying Cat'.
Yet likings for ridiculous song-titles are, thankfully, the only thing that the new L Pierre album has in common with modern jazz. With branding such as 'Rodspots from the Crap Man' there is thankfully, not a bass-solo in sight. Hooray! Instead we have an intoxicating combination of samples, beats and live instruments.
L Pierre, AKA Aiden Moffat is one-half of Arab strap and 'Touchpool' is his second offering as a solo artist; there's no doubting the accomplishment. The record is set to a backdrop of orchestral loops and programmed beats through which a series of further samples and 'real live' matter are interwoven to create a very dark and brooding record. L Pierre seems to uses beats and repetition as an artist uses colours, with which he paints a disarmingly diverse and intense listening treatment. No effort seems to have been made to clean up the scratchy symphonic loops, and when played in conjunction with ouch-tight electro-beats we have a thorough combination of something uber-modern sounding that appears to have been deep-fried in 1930's analogue.
The melodic qualities of the samples are often very dissonant with the emphasis being more on creating mood than any unifying sense of harmony between the elements; thus, the overall feel is one of hypnotic relentlessness and it is within this sense of trance-like intensity that the album excels. Drawing in the listener into an often bizarre and darkly tinged landscape.
And because of the avant-garde and often, surreal make-up of 'Touchpool', the indulgence of the album is akin to getting completely trounced: you are aware that you enjoyed yourself, although you won't quite remember why. And the title 'Jim Dodge Dines at the Penguin Café' will stick in your head, even if nothing else does.
Artists in this article: L Pierre
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