Zubberdust! blasts off with whimsical punk-rock exuberance into a patchwork quilt of insistent interlocking grooves, fluorescent panels of synthesizer, and various could’ve-been aural hallucinations. Both hypnotic and jagged, the music of Avec Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche transfixes with tunnel-vision repetition only to hurl the listener, sometimes suddenly and beguilingly, into a different musical space.
It’s an approach that will certainly be familiar to fans of This Heat and of the band’s parent project Le Fly Pan Am (with whom it shares two members), but one that has not grown tiresome. In fact, although this strategy of carefully constructed fractured monotony is recognizable, the wide sonic palette of the record ensures that each hairpin turn promises something exciting. Stacking voices, decidedly urban-sounding field recordings, and warm synthetic trickles on top of a bed of stiff-necked funk (laid down by rock instrumentation), each track teems with sound and energy. And while inhabiting a very rich sound world, Zubberdust! manages, with each swerve, to circumnavigate any hint of bombast. The style could actually be described as a stylized line-drawing of prog-rock—preserving all the saturated colours and textures (and even multipart suites) but reducing all the shapes to their logical contours.
While Zubberdust! delivers a jolt of surprise similar to some of the Fly Pan Am alumni outings, the recording also offers a bold, abundant, and rather fun perspective on the members’ penchant for mesmeric collagism.
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.