First experimental electronics album from composer Augustin Braud; four contemporary pieces melting organic and industrial sounds.
Legacy DE : "The are moments which can move you to tears in the best seconds. There is a surprising amount of emotion in this experimental soundscape, you just have to stick with it and look for it or let it find you without giving up straight away."
Nine Circles : "Opal Spine is an enigma of a record, a powerful debut made all the stronger by its highly experimental nature. It left me with so many questions about its origins. But ultimately, it’s probably best for this album to retain its sense of mystery to the very end."
A Closer Listen : "Humanity rises from the dust but once, order out of chaos, but then becomes chaos. Is there hope for the crooked spine? The answer seems to be perhaps, but every way forward involves the risk of deeper pain, with no guarantee of relief. Opal Spine implies that the damage is already so great that any chance, no matter how small, may be worth taking."
Ohr Hiemis (winter sun) is the most autonomous means of expression of composer, researcher and multi-instrumentalist Augustin Braud, who has collaborated with some of the most prestigious French and international groups dedicated to the music of our time. On this first album, Braud synthesizes written and improvised material as well as minutious sampling of his own contemporary works through six intertwined pieces structured around modular synthesizer processing as much as over-saturated guitars, mixing venomous experimental noise instilled from the blackest nadir to a rigorous acousmatic constructivism.
Opal Spine is a collection of four pieces, referencing both the composers’ mother health issues linked to the weakness of her spine, as well as the fragile balance between organicity and the ever-growing constructivism of our society. Setting the tone with a musical reading of Celan's Psalm (No one incants our dust), the album culminates to a collapsing void as the only emanation of Braud’s vocals — a remnant of humanity inside the absolute numeric simulacra — chant those hopeless words inspired by Kazuo Shiraga’s art : « Lower than the ground, the Hydra drags me back to myself ».
At the junction of the years 2022 and 2023, Braud experimented the transition between a mostly rural area and Paris, taking with him only a few personal effects and a reduced number of instruments. The result is a compilation of snapshots of materials that become pieces in their own right through a process of itinerant sedimentation, attempts at instrumental appropriation as much as a fantasized mooring to a future home. Between evanescence and inertia, the transhumance towards a new place of life becomes a catachrony, a suspended moment between two spaces and simultaneous temporalities. This diffuse space-time accompanying the passing from one home to another can then be experienced as a space of creation in spite of its inscription in surveillance capitalism.
Those six pieces scream negentropy to the face of an over-saturated world, merging radical amounts of distortion with gentle harmonium or analog synths pads to deconstruct itself from the 4K ultra-definition of our physical worlds. By gleaning musical materials, quasi-field-recordings of his wanderings, sound traces of fugues forward, Braud tried to accomplish his own dehiscence by bursting his singularity in multiple sensitive fragments in order to ally the essence and revenance of the spanned places.
credits
released March 22, 2024
Music by Augustin Braud; composition, performance (vocals, guitars, bass, modular system, synthesizers, keyboards), production.
Recorded by Augustin Braud in Poitiers and Paris, test equipment and additional synthesizers recorded at Willem Twee Studios, Den Bosch.
Mixed by Benjamin Bert. Mastered by Victor Malvolti. Pressed by Monotype, Poland. Artwork and layout by Dehn Sora. Photos by Pierre Jeannelle. Released and sold by Wic Recordings.
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