Review Summary: An interesting beat sampling experiment that still came up with very listenable results.
Dealing with abstract minimal electronics can be a very tricky business. It can be extremely tricky on the listener, but by some recording processes involved, even trickier for the recording artist. This could certainly be one of the reasons that the Swiss abstract electronic artist Yvan Poisson doesn’t want to give any autobiographical details about himself. He wants his music “to speak for itself” he says. He did though give a comment concerning his latest EP Blind Experiment - "With this EP I continue exploring the possibilities from granular sampling, this is where the sounds come from, except for the beats and the bass lines. Once again this is music for the audio enthusiasts; you simply won't enjoy it listening through a poor sound system with no deep bass and at a low volume. This only shines when you are in an appropriate listening situation (and mind). Also, this is not instrumental hip-hop and it is not intended for people to rap on it, so please don't judge it in this way."
Now, this could be very tricky! Giving listening instructions to listeners like this could be a double-edged sword with the negative side actually being much sharper than the positive one. But then look at the process of granular sampling - it is a process also known as granular synthesis where the samples are not played back conventionally but are instead split into small pieces of around 1 to 50*ms. These small musical pieces called grains are then layered on top of each other and you can process them in any manner - change speeds, phases, etc. Even with the machines, today’s electronic musicians use this could be an extremely painstaking and time-consuming process, particularly if you want to end up with anything that approaches listenable, let alone good music.
Luckily, on Blind Experiment Poisson manages to come up with something more than just listenable music. His jazz-based granular samples, as the EP’s title suggests, might have been (re)arranged by chance, but they not only sound seamless but sound like coherent pieces of music, where it is practically impossible to guess where the samples came from. But what is even more important, Poisson’s themes are very listenable, having a late night, at times almost sinister touch, making them a perfect suit for some noir science fiction crime story.
Oh, the EP does sound much better for higher quality equipment…
