Greg Davis & Sebastien Roux

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4...according to our Phil on Thu 27 Jan, 2011.

This one is new to us. Not had it before but it starts off with a minute or so of white noise which proper woke me up then. Now the cobwebs have been shaken off I can get into this fucker properly. This veers from the electroacoustic (again I know....) side of things with lots of strange electronics wedged here and there. Occasionally you'll get some really intense harsh noise and that's appealing greatly to me today. Also there's elements of jazz and drone in there so it's a proper mixed bag of genres all carefully woven together. It's rare that you hear so many ideas put together into one record which work quite as well as this one does. Track 3 is a fine example of this which starts with loads of noisy thunderous fuzz, before it shifts pace to some gentle electroacoustic business with some guitar strumming and wobbly-ness, then some electronics come in, then some intense drones, then the fuzz, and so it carries on all over the shop. It's like an experimental rock opera!

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Greg Davis and Sébastien Roux are back with their second collaborative album following the acclaimed release “Paquet surprise”. “Merveilles”, translated from the French word as wonderland, describes the album very fitting as the songs have a very illustrative quality. Where the previous album relied a bit more on sweet melodies and quick changes “Merveilles” explores different sound worlds in depth and illuminates a terrain of diverse emotional scenarios. Silent passages of field recordings are combined with subtle harmonic layers, interrupted by sudden noise eruptions and contrasted by folk like guitar melodies and very concrete sounds, often leaving the listener wondering what the origin of this tone might be.
It is a pleasure to have a documentary of this interesting collaboration in which both musicians are able to realise their grown individual expertise. Sébastien Roux, working at the IRCAM and well known for his success in continuing the French line of music concrète in a new and contemporary way, clearly helps to establish the abstract narrative form of this record with arrangements of cut and edited pieces of concrete recordings. The influence of Greg Davis, often described as the anchor figure in the forming of the laptop folk scene, is clearly audible in melodic guitar lines and the construction of dense harmonic drones. But the strength of this collaboration is the fact that Greg Davis and Sébastien Roux combine their musical ideas creating a very unique approach of their own. This record clearly combines elements of serious and popular music in a highly thoughtful and contemporary way, widening the edges of by now established stylistic fields that Davis and Roux once helped to define.
“Merveilles” consists of edits of live recordings made during a tour through Europe and the US in 2005 - it is the pleasant proof that electronic music of such richness in detail can be played and composed live.