French performer Romain Perrot is one we admire for his very distinctive and powerful noise records as well as his bizarre and extreme approach to song deconstruction, but here he is with his own take on musique concrète, or electro-acoustic composition.
Acousquantics (DECIMATION SOCIALE DSTAPEACOUS) contains two long tape collage suites, one from 2022 and one from 2025; the earlier version was, we are told, “commissioned for GRM Paris”, which seems to suggest he received a prestigious offer from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, that important authority that has been the guardian of official French experimentation since its 1950s origins under Pierre Schaeffer. The cover photo here shows our man at work in the clinical studio with an impressive mixing desk in upright mode and some mysterious boxes equipped with twiddling knobs; but the most unusual feature of this image is the red band attached to his forehead, which I suppose is some sort of ambisonic listening device, but (given the serious expression on his visage) also makes the whole thing look like a grisly scientific self-experiment in mind control or thought-processing, as if the machines were harvesting his very brain cells.
This 2022 composition is not noisy or filled with extreme volumes, but it’s still utterly bizarre; a queasy mix of his own recordings made with voice and guitars, along with collaged found sounds such as church organs or accordion playing, plus stray singers drifting in from the radio or old chanson records. While many collagists and layering types have played around in this mode before, few have done it with the strange and warped vision of Perrot, whose singular view of the world emerges from these crazed juxtapositions and totally illogical pairings. The work also builds to a crescendo of density and complexity that will baffle the mind, unless you’ve been paying attention to the twisty roads of anti-logic.
The 2025 cut is not, I think, a reworked version of the same materials, but it might overlap with some of the same themes: church choirs emerge with a sweet tune, innocents surrounded by dark goblins and other imps of the perverse. It’s still an unsettling episode whose long tones and eerie moments will keep the listener in a perpetual state of alienated tension as we await a visitation from unknown entities lurking in the hidden recesses of our own home. Even the innovative name for this compositional mode of his, “Acousquantics”, is somehow very fitting; I had to look up the word “quantic”, but apparently it means “a homogeneous polynomial in two or more variables” and may have something to do with quantum physics, although “polynomial” is a term used in algebra. In my mind, it must mean a way of saying three impossible things before breakfast, and when combined with the art of acousmatics, it results in this very unique and inventive tape recording.
Romain Perrot should be proud; Schaeffer is nodding approvingly from his magnetic-tape paradise in the great Revox in the sky. (27/08/2025)
Update from an email received from Romain Perrot: “Yes I did really had a commission from the GRM in Paris, and I played live the piece at Maison de la Radio. I did spent a few days in their studio to finalize the composition. It was an incredible moment.”