Éric La Casa / Jérôme Noetinger
Off Tracks
USA ERSTWHILE RECORDS erstwhile 101 CD (2025)
Since 2018 if not earlier we are used to hearing Éric La Casa’s ambitious minimalist sound-art epics released on his own Swarming label from Paris, so it’s interesting that today’s offering – where he effectively “plays” the city along with the great Noetinger as his drifting partner – arrives on the Erstwhile Records label run by Jon Abbey in New Jersey. Well, interesting to me, but maybe I’m reading too much into it. Erstwhile Records has been home to many impressive releases situated more or less in the improvisation area since 1999, and we remember with great fondness certain records by Keith Rowe, Otomo Yoshihide, Thomas Lehn, and other greats.
Off Tracks probably isn’t free improvisation, although Jérôme Noetinger has collaborated in that milieu during his allotted span, and La Casa has occasionally invited an improvising sax player or two into one of his urban site-specific event recordings, to add extra depth and concrete resonance to an underground carpark or modern apartment block. Today’s item is all buildings, specifically empty or abandoned ones, and Noetinger speaks eerily of “a drift through the ghostly trace of a vanished presence” in reference to these phantomic captures. It might also be an experiment proving something about the physical deterioration of magnetic tape, assuming they’re still getting some mileage from their Webcors and Voxes. Or making suggestions about the general decay of sound. More intriguing still, they hint at a presence that is following them around, in the styled of an M.R. James malign spirit, as they create their sounds.
It would be crass of this writer to suggest we could treat the whole of Off Tracks as a detective story where the listener has to identify a hidden entity in among the shadows and unpromising aural footage, and yet there remains this feeling of constant tension that compels us to keep listening. I think it’s always been part of Éric La Casa’s general plan to reveal what is hidden in our cities; more than just a simple field recording guy with powerful mics, he has to somehow act as a psychologist or a Renaissance scryer, peering into the liminal zones with a penetrating gaze. Where his previous item Barrières Mobiles did have these qualities, it was also spilling over into a socio-political statement, and a highly critical one at that; Off Tracks may lack that particular edge, but actually I very much enjoy the way it’s not necessarily attempting to tell us anything specific, and these larger-than-life audio portraits of modern urban spaces are beautiful, spacious, and teeming with minute fleeting details.
So many would-be sound artists nowadays boast of creating an “immersive” environment, but here is the real deal. (18/09/2025)