French saxophonist Clément Edouard has enlisted some friends to produce this most extraordinary and atmospheric suite of pieces for three:four. With him on electronics, Linda Olah and Isabel Sorling on vocals, and Julian Chamla on cymbals and harp bass, you kind of know that Dix Ailes is going to be something special.
I wasn’t quite prepared for the whispered female vocals and addled distortion that introduce opener “Antic Spell”. The words are barely above breathing and appear like spirits exhaling. The uneasy electronics and scattered samples creep and clatter like unseen things lurking in shadows, and at points it felt like you were watching CCTV footage, cutting from one camera to another, desperately searching for movement in the grainy images as if a complex were under siege from some unknown assailants.
It is quite a dramatic start that the acapella introduction of “Wings And Stones” manages to soothe. The vocals are beautiful in their resonance and almost hyper-real in their closeness to you. Although singing together, the routes they take to arrive at a conclusion are wonderful, sometimes high, sometimes low, not always matching but somehow bound together. When the ebb and flow of a drone appears and takes over, there is an air of anticipation that carries on into “Fall Out”. A slow tolling of something echoes all through the piece, but is overwhelmed at points by the bursts of static and vocal snippets. Could this be the harp bass? The elements are disparate but the effect is compelling. The use of birdsong and rain on “Shock” paints a confusing picture. The vocals are pure and clean like the rain, but somehow outside of nature while the electronic tones are from another realm entirely, and it is this juxtaposition that is so effective. When the album closes out with “The Present”, its glacial pace and huge swathes of silence give the air of a reverie, or even of some place of reverence which feels as though it should be meditative, but is actually too tense for that. We are constantly wondering what will come next, even after the silence denoting the end of the album is upon us and we revert back to normality.Dix Ailes is quite a remarkable work of texture and atmosphere that sadly is over too soon. I envy those coming at it for the first time.
-Mr Olivetti-
