My first thought as I begin reading about Swiss-born, Berlin-based veteran musician and recorder Gilles Aubry and his new LP built from “sound check situations,” is that my soundcheck archive probably sounds a good bit different — not that you’d expect overlap with West Virginia wedding band banter and a processed mosaic of traditional Berber music. Recorded between 2013-14 and finished in studio later, And Who Sees the Mystery culminates a residency spent with local musicians in the magical city of Tafraout in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, exploring “Berber-Amazigh voices, instruments, rhythms and spaces.” Though an active collaborator Aubry seems best known for his holistic installation work with a variety of international institutions, so its appropriate that he would produce an engrossing album of threshold sounds and focused collage-work from his time in such an evocative setting. His processing draws out the individual orientations of sound check ephemera, percussion, bells, drones or digressions, smearing them into larger patterns or using them to rebound in new directions — resonating, ringing, wailing, or wandering. The resulting sounds elicit a sense of creation and destruction, tightly bound together, held in stasis for perusal.
Re√iew: Gilles Aubry – And Who Sees The Mystery (Decoder Magazine USA)
My first thought as I begin reading about Swiss-born, Berlin-based veteran musician and recorder Gilles Aubry and his new LP built from “sound check situations,” is that my soundcheck archive probably sounds a good bit different — not that you’d expect overlap with West Virginia wedding band banter and a processed mosaic of traditional Berber music. Recorded between 2013-14 and finished in studio later, And Who Sees the Mystery culminates a residency spent with local musicians in the magical city of Tafraout in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, exploring “Berber-Amazigh voices, instruments, rhythms and spaces.” Though an active collaborator Aubry seems best known for his holistic installation work with a variety of international institutions, so its appropriate that he would produce an engrossing album of threshold sounds and focused collage-work from his time in such an evocative setting. His processing draws out the individual orientations of sound check ephemera, percussion, bells, drones or digressions, smearing them into larger patterns or using them to rebound in new directions — resonating, ringing, wailing, or wandering. The resulting sounds elicit a sense of creation and destruction, tightly bound together, held in stasis for perusal.
Dwight Pavlovic