Reflecting on symbolic imagery and how it is connected to physical objects, Franck Vigroux‘s Totem LP bristles with sampladelic energy and visceral bass perturbations. Over the course of ten tracks, he grasps hold of the listener’s attention and shakes their auditory perceptions until they start to buckle under the strain.
While some pieces move to a muscular synthetic throb, beats kicking and flexing in lugubrious pumps and cycling hisses, their propulsive natures delineated by twinkling melodic sprinkles, others swing further out, turning and looking back from dense thickets of electronic noise. Here, Vigroux’s rhythmic constructions have something of the dub techno about them, even more of that Pan Sonic seethe and switch, sharp intakes of sampled sounds denatured and repurposed into the forms that hats and crashes might otherwise serve when constructing the sounds of linear electronic music.
Vigroux doesn’t necessarily seem to be aiming for the dancefloor, more for that imaginary terpsichorean landscapes that lurk behind closed eyes and headphoned ears, the motion designed to stimulate the intellect as much as it is to direct attention towards notions of forward travel. As the album passes through manipulations and accumulations redolent of accumulating intensity and spatial transmission of “Baron”, for instance, so the soundfield becomes further populated with elements that together construct a mindscape complete in and of itself. “Elephant” sets out at a suitably considered pace, its lowering atmospheres content to make themselves known in a slow reveal of minimalist swells and accumulating shards of atonal shivers. These soon become the dominant denominator, seemingly filling up every available area of the audio spectrum in a welter of scalding yet somewhat soothingly present noise, one that moves majestically with a sense of purpose, even grandeur. Likewise, the piercing trills, scraping and sonorous drones of “Frontières”reverberate and thrum with a contemplative air, musing calmly yet vibrantly before the shuddering blasts of “Télévision” ramp up the energy levels in a stomping round of intricately mechanistic sequenced beats. This loud-quiet-loud pacing is handled well throughout Totems, with no particular stylistic form allowed to overwhelms the senses, instead travelling a course at once familiar (as are most totems, at least to the cultures which worship them).The multi-layered harmonics of “Diaphane” bring Totem to a close with an almost elegiac feeling of a derivé, an apparently unstructured meander that coalesces into the brightly optimistic pastures of what in other centuries might have been rendered on a church organ. Instead, Franck Vigroux offers up his vision of the ineffable in a welter of deconstructed samples that still hold the promise that it is possible to come closer to apprehending the sublime within such richly textured digital renderings.
-Linus Tossio-
