Ethereal (FR)

Continuing his companionship with the 12k label, it is quite logical that Arovane comes to offer a collaborative disc with Taylor Deupree, manager of the American structure, and great familiar with albums shared with other musicians. Here, two prominent figures of ambient and electronics interfere, on a long-format produced thanks to file exchanges on the internet (the pandemic having prevented physical interactions between them). The inclination gradually taken, in recent years, by Arovane leads him to find, with Deupree, a completely suitable fellow student to cross their luminous musical snippets, their delicate sound ranges and their slight disturbances.

As such, we revel in the fine crackling and graininess put in place by Uwe Zahn and Taylor Deupree, clever counterparts to their more welcoming flat tints. Placed with a very elaborate economy of means, these materials arouse both an interest in the listener who is invited to scrutinize their arrival, but also constitute a form of breathing, breathing life into the musicians’ tracks (Pfad_Onset or Denn_Repp). Beyond these proposals, the German and the New Yorker also know how to deliver much more fluffy objects, thanks to a few padded tessitura (Sill_Lili) or equally silky keyboard notes (Neben_Ghost).

As the album progresses, these two lines come together, resulting in tracks like Stenn_Dispel (a subtle cross between a contained granular synthesis, controlled squeals and pearly notes) or Etta_Lorn (appearance of mini-explosions during that soft notes bounce on the surface), even, at the very end of the disc, to a more dreamlike conclusion (Barn_Abnd, its vegetable rustlings and its chirpings of birds).