Anne Gillis, Aha, Belgium, La Scie Dorée, limited edition vinyl LP (2024)
Nearly 40 years after its first release, French composer / performer Anne Gillis’s album “Aha” is being reissued on vinyl (apparently for the first time, so I am guessing it was originally released on tape) in a limited edition of 500 copies by Belgian label La Scie Dorée. All the sounds, noises and effects on “Aha” were created by the artist on a tape deck used as a compositional tool to treat and distort various sound sources including field recordings, electronics, percussion and Gillis’s own vocals and their extensions into the often nightmarish and disturbing soundscapes that appear. The album has the raw feel of being a home-based production, and I imagine that this very crude, home-made quality has become part of the recording’s attraction to collectors of Gillis’s work and similar minimal industrial, musique concrète and DIY post-punk releases from the 1980s.
Although the eleven tracks on this album have their own distinct identities from the particular combinations of tape loops and distortions that constitute them, they are all best heard as one continuously evolving tapestry of sound art. (In more precise terms: listen to the whole album from start to finish!) The journey through these tracks becomes very intriguing, even mysterious and sinister, as we traverse the spooky, cave-like ambience of “Nagsunie” with its rattle and bubble loops, or the discombobulating watery underworld of “Uythe”. Most disturbing of all is the closing track “Inversion” featuring actual weeping sounds under an ominous brain-torture device looping rhythm. In-between these tracks are more light-hearted pieces (or maybe not so, depending on your point of view) like “Brouette fantôme”, which sounds a bit like a chorus of dolphins in their spaceship zooming away from Earth (now why on … Earth would they do that for?), the shrill, watch-ticking “Aaisth” and the tumbledown horn-blowy “Verre mûri”.
Taken individually, the tracks themselves are not much more than exercises in creating and sustaining particular mash-ups of rhythmic looping textures, and I suppose this feature together with the crude production enhances the recording’s DIY reputation. The soundscapes created though do have a very adventurous and energetic nature, and even after almost 40 years still sound very fresh as though they had been created not so long ago.