La Creuse by Eric La Casa + Cédric Peyronnet

Recorded in la Creuse (France) July 2006
Mixed by Eric La Casa and Cedric Peyronnet (toy bizarre) September 2006 - June 2007

Our project is to defined by its aim : to represent in sonic terms, and in duo, a particular environment - a triangular area in the north of La Creuse department in central France


review :
This terrific album deals with inscrutable sound, the kind of thing that will challenge and delight even those folks smitten with field recordings and understated electroacoustics. The music here is often more lively and dense than one might find on, say, a Toshiya Tsunoda record. But the pieces constructed by these two members of the fairly under-heralded French experimental music scene nonetheless possess a furtive, occluded quality. Rooted in field recordings from July 2006, each composer has produced a series of fairly exacting portraits or sound distillations from the central French department that gives the disc its name.The actual tracks assembled combine both La Casa’s and Peyronnet’s efforts from these precise locations. They do so in a way that seems to both obscure and clarify features of the landscape, atmosphere or topography (a vividness that comes through despite the fact that most listeners to this disc have never visited its locus).Things begin with a tapestry of burbles and singing glass on “La roche des fees.” This combination of materials seems to be a central concern for La Casa and Peyronnet, a recurring focus that renders strange the familiar and vice versa. On the fabulous “Le rocher Jupille,” one can faintly detect choirs singing, though the sound is mostly buried by a different chorus (of insects and woodpeckers). The sound purrs and patters along until it wells up in volume and intensity, as if you’d just opened the door to the piece’s exterior.
“Le Peux” unfurls like a slowly growing wave of soft static and buzzing metal that’s trying to talk to you, until it surprises with a blade of squealing sound that bursts forth to the accompaniment of helicopter blades and whining motors. “Le bois de Parnac” is presumably a study in wood, and seems to hint at shapes it refuses to actually take, instead coming across like a concerto for muffles and retreats.
This, too, could be a metonym for the recording as a whole: a flirtation with the concrete, both in the sense of an identifiable source and of a possible destination. That tensional moment – when the senses are provoked by the reference slipping away – is what makes these pieces. “Le Confolent” could be amplified crumpling paper noises suddenly catching fire. High tones sing out occasionally in a way that reminds you that electronics are at work. And occasionally drones thicken palpably, giving things a more conventional dynamic sensibility.
But the impression cumulatively ascends beyond these particulars somehow precisely because of their very suggestiveness. A growth of static, a snippet of shakers and rattles, the sound of being inside a storm drain, a rusted merry-go-round emulating guitar feedback. Each marvelously realized piece evokes these unfamiliar places, as bittersweet and fleeting as memory. Just a terrific record. Jason Bivins, http://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/

For 30 years, while listening to the environment, I have been questioning the perception of reality and has tried to expand the notion of infra-ordinary (space-time at low intensity), from background noise to the inaudible, through the wait, the pause.

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