“This Daniel B. album is intended for fans of an extraordinary sound experience where patient ears are rewarded”
1 Daniel B. - Main Set 48:33
2 Daniel B. - Xtra 3:57
(CD/DDL 52:30) (V.F.)
(Ambient Experimental Music)
When we talk about an album difficult to assimilate, that of Daniel B. is certainly part of the lot! It was as part of the db2fluctuation Electronic Ambient Music Event, held on February 22, 2020, that Daniel Bressanutti, half of Nothing But Noise, presented his mosaic of experimental electronic music made up of several small pieces of music that he designed over the past 20 years. Let's say at the outset that DANIEL B. LIVE 2020 is an album that has to be listened to in private, unless you have someone besides you who loves the genre as much as you, so much its sonic textures sewn into a psychedelic quilt will make tremble the ears to those who are living in your environment. Chronicle of an album made for not everyone….
Conceived of daring and imagination, the Main Set begins with cosmic sounds, like an extraterrestrial language, grabbed by inter-sidereal winds which bring to my ears a diversity of white noises and electro-acoustic fries. Little by little, these elements of high and low frequencies evaporate in a spatial purring whose broad veil of reverberations undulates in an indecisive flow, like these cosmic whales and their silent chants. A huge bass pulse emits its beams of tonal radiations in a turtle sprint of barely 70 seconds before Eleanor Rigby's violins invade my senses with a lento flow. We float and dance a cosmic slow dance in our head, whereas the chords strumming on a keyboard place the first melodious interlude on Main Set. The violins and the keyboard take the aperitif in a texture of ambiences where the flow becomes more jerky and the arpeggios dissolve in a mincer of harmonies a little after the 12 minutes. Digestion goes badly with this hyper-choppy flow that turns into a salad of electronic filaments with a bass that roars muted, like in the best moments of The Contino Sessions album from Death In Vegas. We're almost in anti-music here, except there's a chord that is heard as it skips briskly through these huge moving graffiti that seem to suffer like the tetanizing metal of music. My ears are in a sonic galaxy filled with electro-acoustic mysteries, ear-eating reverberations and white noises, before a static rhythm spreads its stationary frenzy that constantly unrolls like a mass of jerky jerks for a whopping 6 minutes. Tonal exhaustion occurs halfway through Main Set where Daniel B. drags me on a different sonic route.
Everything is allowed for the next 6 minutes. Squeaks of sonic pigs reared to eat electronic beeps in front of mockingbirds and in a storm of sound waves that deviate towards an industrial area, there where Daniel B. stocked up on anti-music in a musical metal factory. A bass pulse begins a debonair walk after the 29 minutes have passed. This is where the sounds and tones are tortured. And like that, pouf! The second melodious moment arises after the 31st minute. Arpeggios skip over it with contagious luminosity, even creating a musical canon and a crossroads of melodies which brightens up the ears and makes us say; have you ever been bored here? And the released arpeggios continue to bounce in order to get rid of the cramps of inertia, as well as the multiple bed sores, and whose echoes merge into a sinister phase around the 36th minute. A phase that will initiate the best movement of this Main Set in an off-beat dance that will resist the multiple bites of a titanic bug with sharp poetic teeth in a final where I tell myself that Daniel B. had other things to express in sounds and distortions. As evidenced by the 4 minutes of Xtra which can be any 8 minute segment, and maybe a little more, of the Main Set being delivered at high speed.
What more can we say about DANIEL B. LIVE 2020!? Nothing! I believe that everything has been said and that other words can replace mine, but the context will be the same. This Daniel B. album is intended for fans of an extraordinary sound experience where patient ears are rewarded in a few places, making us discover the meanders of a universe that few artists dare to exploit.
Sylvain Lupari (July 31st, 2020) ***½**
Available at db2fluctuation Bandcamp