daylies music: Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Monday, March 30, 2009

Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Thomas Bel -The Birds are still the Monarchs (Annexia )

Posted: 30 Mar 2009 04:16 AM PDT

Thomas Bel often oblique fusion of acoustic (guitars, cello, field-recordings) and digital processing with its gestures of clicks, drones, looped harmonics and tonal extensions. The hiss and crackle of the processing texture audible landscapes interweaving, often, shutter and mechanism of recording device, or its simulacra, positioning itself against environmental sound and gleaming tone play at the quiet end of quiet. The presence of the mechanism heightens the tension against the organic reverence of sound and the play of extending the qualities of tone, lengthening, bending, modulating around dimensions elastic. Wavering at times, introducing counterpoised instruments to bridge and mark phrasing, then reintroducing thematic elements and structural recurrence.

Lende Lende displays precisely the crisp manipulation, extensions of sounds through digital effect and clarity of the medium. Bel, whispers and murmurs his poetry in Negative waters, darks reflections, layered emotive difference. In Die Linen der Herbestes, tonal frequencies play against poetic layers that add to choral cycle and move against organesque effect, guitar movements counterpoised with electronic crackle, glitch and ambience. A demi penche sur ton murme, ends the album with deep tonal harmonic cycles both melancholic and sublime.

Bel who works and lives in Toulouse, France brings together his varied interests in sound, photography and poetry to bear on this project. The question of where one begins and ends becomes a non question as the fluid embrace of Bels display captivates the senses towards the notion of the all encompassing poetics of the world. Towards a foundationless foundation, ever present overflowing brimming full word sound image of life in constant presence.