Hitoshi Kojo and Yannick Dauby – La Vie Dans Les Airs Et Dans Les Eaux

Substantia Innominata

Creaky, scraping, spinning tones and the sound of rolling objects on metal; ominous drones and fragrantly uptilted shimmers abound, horns and moans, whirrs and clicks: these are the sounds and more to be found on the two sides of Hitoshi Kojo and Yannick Dauby‘s La Vie Dans Les Airs Et Dans Les Eaux. The latest offering in Drone Records‘ 10″ vinyl Substantia Innominata imprint (this time around appearing as only a single black disc), Hojo and Dauby’s EP continues the label’s mission to bring varied and unusual sounds into neatly-packaged and recorded life.

Each face skips past in a whirr and whirl of immersive musique concrète, drips and bows splashing and scraping, and what sounds like a factory siren keening in mournful tones. Perhaps it’s marking the death of music, though that’s been done here and before many times over the last century and more. There’s much to be enjoyed on La Vie Dans Les Airs Et Dans Les Eaux, both for its detail and for the delicately constructed arrangements, especially when that involves somnambulist frog choirs rippling at the threshold.

Kojo and Dauby make their source material sing, but maybe it’s not quite possible to discern the lyrics in words, more as sensations; instead, in proper (pre-/post-)modernist fashion, each listener can call it glass-framed pinball or bathroom ambience, should they care to. Whatever the case, side B devolves convincingly into a wailing and wibbling morass that slides towards a cacophony of what could be a party balloon-troubling ritual (who knows — there may be such things, if the evidence presented on “La Vie Dans Les Eaux” is anything to go by) gone horripilatingly odd is stroke of unsettling creakiness worthy of Nurse With Wound.

-Linus Tossio-