Yan Hart-Lemonnier – Le Partage Des Griefs

Adaadat
Yan Hart-Lemonnier‘s second release for Adaadat pretty much lives up to its title. Le Partage Des Griefs translates as ‘the sharing of grievances’ and there is something of a relentless kind of grief-stricken melancholy that infects the synthetic sounds unleashed here.

Opener “À Quoi Vous Servait L’Espoir De Toute Façon” emerges from the speakers aching and full of effort. It doesn’t feel rough or spiky, just tired. listless and fatigued. The lunging synths sound ground down on “Baphomet Beach Club” and lay a gloomy backdrop for the sea of found sounds and extracted snippets that scamper and stray in the foreground. They snap on the heels of the synths, frustrated and restless, and set up the eternal dichotomy that runs through the album.

A grand drone scours the earth, clearing all memory of what came before, sweeping gently, undulating and pervasive. It is more of a removal of memory, trying to make good the melancholy that has come before and treads a fine line between experimental soundscape and emotional resonance. Pieces hover into view, expelled from somewhere unknown and certainly with no real precedent.

The divergence between the lovely keyboard refrain and the scrapes and squawks of lonely creatures that it frames itself is the perfect expression of how this album operates. They seem to force their presence on the title track, and there is something about it this alchemical transaction that evokes an image of Yan, a monochrome still-life, head bowed over esoteric instrumentation, concentrating on teasing out these exotic yet lonesome soundscapes like an abandoned one-man Radiophonic Workshop working on a forgotten soundtrack that will never see the light of day.

The album artwork captures the search for the macroscopic and the microscopic in the world of sound. Elements are smashed together like some sort of musical Hadron Collider or distant sparks of comet-like brilliance interfering with dusty flickers of sonic detritus hurtling earthwards. The sounds can be awkward, and at times I am assailed by some distant image of a kind of musical Dr Moreau stitching dark, uncomfortable waltz-like shuffles with the natural beating of insect wings. Yan is fabricating soundscapes that won’t exist anywhere else, disappearing down a trail-less path of his own invention, transplanting hints of analogue warmth onto some desiccated nostalgic future. The drones the are employed have a way of extracting you from the day to day, and dropping you into some airless place, serene but discomforting.

Curiously, on final track “Tout Le Monde Sait Mieux Que Toi”, there is an attempt to banish all that went before. It is an hypnotic beat-driven chimera that intrigues as much as it surprises, ending the journey in an unexpected way that is part a relief, but is also like a step back into the real world; the world of rhythm and order that was slowly being eroded. It taunts the listener into replaying the record, just to ensure that what you have just enjoyed really did happen.