Featured Artist: Bruno Chevillon

CD Title: hors-champ

Year: 2007

Record Label: D'Autres Cordes Records

Style: Other

Review:

Here, French bassist and supreme experimentalist Bruno Chevillon delves into avant, (acoustic & electric) bass and electronica for this cutting-edge record label.   With alien-like manipulations and ominously designed sound swashes, the artist commingles a potpourri of mini-themes into a broad sound spectrum.  He supplants it all with booming lines and monstrous licks, largely embedded into a wide-open musical vista.

On the piece titled “Dans sa tete abaissee,” female vocalist Antye Greie-Fuchs orates in French atop Chevillon’s eerily sculpted sense of quietude.  But in other spots, he generates bombastic sound structures, often rooted upon a menacing heartbeat.  However, it’s all artistically inclined and not simply construed in such a way that intimates aimless noise-shaping.  Then again, some of these works might conjure up notions of Armageddon, yet it’s all about the ability for the mind’s eye to become lost within the bassist’s seemingly out-there sense of musicality.  These notions come into play during “Partir des choses,” where Chevillon institutes an electronic, off-kilter drum grove followed by massive bass lines and contrasting tones.  And then he wreaks havoc on “Lear-machine” via layered EFX and guerrilla-bass tactics.  Therefore, the artist’s latest effort is a standout, and one that will assuredly keep you on the outer realm of rhyme, reason and sanity.

Record Label Website: http://www.digitruc.com

Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita

---

Copyright© 2008 JazzReview.com®. All Rights Reserved.