The Answer Is In The Beat

Le Berger: Music For Guitar & Patience (Home Normal, 2015)

January 30, 2016 at 5:14 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

This one seemed like a pretty average drone album on first listen, but the title, cover, and packaging made me listen again. The CD packaging is presented so that the amazing cover art of a joyous porch singer is framed, and there’s a unique photo inside of the booklet (mine has three women throwing snowballs in front of a house in a suburban neighborhood, probably sometime during the ’50s or so). And there’s an additional insert with a small translucent photo of a mountain and lake inside some sort of computer chip-looking thing. It has “AGFACHROME” printed on the back, Wikipedia suggests it’s some sort of film slide from the ’30s or ’40s? So, very mysterious, personal, handmade packaging. Musically, it’s three long guitar pieces with keyboard-mashed titles. They seem to consist of reversed guitar loops, and they’re actually quite prickly and rough, definitely not the type of fluffy cloud drone that these releases turn out to be sometimes, but I’ve fallen asleep to it easily a few times, so it’s definitely functional that way if you don’t turn it up too loud. But it’s really detailed and fascinating if you pay attention to it. And of course the packaging makes it feel like an artifact or a work of art, something you’d find encased in a museum.