Review Summary: Nicolas Jaar's new find has some bright ideas, but could have done a lot more with them.
As the the latest micro-EP from Nicolas Jaar-run label Other People,
Disquiet is both novel and utterly unsurprising. Beat-less choral cut-ups and minimalistic cello exhaust John Bence's palette, which marks a welcome change for a label that in keeping to a particular aesthetic has struggled to crawl out from the shadow of its founder. At the same time, the album fails to create anything substantial and barely crawls past the 12 minute mark, making it shorter than most singles and sadly characteristic of a lot of Other People's output.
The technique used to make
Disquiet, however, is quite interesting. Bence recorded a composition for choir and cello, took the electronic scalpel to it and sewed the parts into a new piece. Then, scalpel still in hand, did it again. In other words, he made a remix of a remix of his own tune: a Frankenstein monster of Frankenstein monsters made from his own skin.
The result is initially pleasant: 'Disquiet Movement I' opens with gentle layers of clear female cries folding into each other in a sound eerily reminiscent of Plinth's 'Sirens'. From there, it flounders: grasping on to a slower, more ominous form of the same and fizzling out fairly quickly.
'Disquiet Movement II' follows a similar structure but is drastically improved by slow cello notes, which give the track a bit more meat to stretch over. It also displays what might possibly be the point of the whole venture, as Bence juxtaposes the raw vocal notes with dehumanised, twice-processed blips in a manner so fascinatingly disturbing it is a wonder he didn't make more of it. Like someone sat face-to-face with a lobotomised version of themselves, there's no better way to show human beauty than confronting it with what remains after you take it away.
Unfortunately that is the most we get out of
Disquiet, as the final track takes us back to formless vocal swells and a sense of tension which is never really satisfied or otherwise dealt with. It just kind of falls, limp, at the end: a twice-cut-up, indistinguishable aural dot of 'l-' in need of more letters to give it meaning; the three successive lives of
Disquiet all tied together in quicksand and pulling in different directions. Sinking for want of clear direction.
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