Faqt (US)

The debut album by Montreal native Ghislain Poirier is getting quite a push from his label, 12k, and why shouldn’t it? After all, meticulously-constructed vaporscapes this good don’t come around all that often. Okay, I’ll buy into the hype: Poirier assembled his works, owing as much sonically to his labelboss Taylor Deupree as he does to the minimalist beats of the Chain Reaction label, on a severly-dated computer, which meant he had to construct the loops and piece them together separately. It shows: the title track slowly adds layers of jittery percussion and subliminal lines of melody; an alarm clock fades in, shrugging off layers of rust, centered around a chopped loop of feedback on Desequilbre. While I don’t think that cries of genius are warrented, one has to give the man credit for coaxing a universe of engrossing sound out of less-than-expansive means. – jason olariu