Excellent 10-inch slice of absurdist noise and composition in the form of Oeil Céleste (DOUBTFUL SOUNDS)…it’s in clear vinyl, limited and numbered, and packaged in a clear sleeve with a thick piece of cardboard backing it up…printed on said cardboard is the name of the project “Astagrob” using old-fashioned block printing methods…there are postcard inserts, and some fabulous Dadaist poems printed on the labels, making plain their allegiance to the cut-up style and “Words in Freedom”…plus there’s an image of a fly hovering over a punched hole in the card. Said fly loses his wings on the flipside of this card. Be warned…a similar tragic fate awaits the unwary listener who will lose brain cells and tenuous hold on reality…
Astagrob is a team-up between Ogrob and Astatine. Ogrob (Sebastien Borgo) has been inflicting mental pain on this house with his diabolical, powerful aural spells for many years to the memory, while Astatine is an alias for Stéphane Recrosio, another French composer who has been unleashing his own strain of freakish ambient noise on his own Orgasm label in that country for at least five years, often in the form of eight-inch lathe-cuts. The A-side of Oeil Céleste may have the most immediate appeal to noise-addicts, and it’s a highly assured arrangement (some might call it a pile-up) of uncanny elements, fitted together with intent to maim and hurt. I’m very impressed at the confidence with which this violent agglomeration has been cemented together…would like to see more of this instead of the usual tentative “experiments” from other corners, which blight the world of music today.
The B-side is less of a slammeroo in the mush, but it’s an intoxicating mix of field recordings stirred together with lo-fi ambient junk, which includes shrieking birds which may be from Australia, and an overall ambience which can’t decide whether to be countryside or industrial factory, and settles in some mid-way no-man’s-land where the skies are purple and the atmosphere is at risk of pollution. Vivid, alien landscapes…that’s the way to arrange your field recordings if you want to make an impression these days. Apparently there are six separate compositions on this mind-blender of a record, though it all solidifies into a continuous collapsing ruin as you play it. A remarkable little gem of sound-art with surrealist undertones. From 19 April 2016.
