Project-updates, part 2.

Music-




I currently have two records and a brand-new live band in the works.



First, the third record from my solo experimental electronic project LeVautourEnsemble is well underway. This one’s called “From the Sketchbook.”

Like the first two (2010’s “…whose wings are a dull reality”, and 2011’s “Machinique Meltdown”, both available for free download [with a whole lot of other neat stuff] on Headhat Records) this one is also a bit of an oddball repurposing of the idea of the “concept-record.” This time around, as the name of the record may imply, I’ve assigned myself the task of navigating a sketchbook where I had been jotting down fragments of transient ideas over the course of several years… and writing songs based on those fragments… even if (or, especially if) I have NO idea what the hell the initial note meant. To throw myself an additional layer of challenge, I’m tracking this record entirely on an ancient Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. (Special thanks to Dan Holmes for loaning me this phenomenally monstrous device).

I’ve nicknamed him “Brutus.” If anyone remembers tracking audio with these things, add about twenty-five years to let Brutus’s physical parts get downright-elderly in electronics-years, and you can begin to imagine how beautifully cantankerous and temperamental he is now. Working with Brutus is much like riding an ornery rodeo-bull; I’m definitely not in charge here. (I’ve always joked that the other members of LeVautourEnsemble’s “Ensemble” are machines and robots… this has never been more true.) By design, this record will sound NOTHING like what I envision it sounding like in my head. (Special thanks for this one are also due to the guy who owns "The Music Connection" in Manchester, NH, for having had the foresight to stock-pile the Type-II cassette-tapes that Brutus requires back when they stopped making them, while everyone else's response when I was trying to track them down was more like "You're looking for what? WHY??")



Some sneak-peak sample of tracks from this record can be heard here-

.. streaming/ download from a recent charity-compilation...

…and here-

Additionally, this album will be the last material I’ll release under the “LeVautourEnsemble” name. My plan is to consider the three records some odd sort of a “trilogy” (maybe even make some sort of limited-edition packaging of them as such available) and retire the moniker. This isn’t to imply that I’m going to stop making this sort of music (who knows), but more that the idea of maintaining false separations between various sorts of solo-content has run its course.



The second record I am working on is a recording of a live-DJ megamix-set of sorts… It’s called “Vulture From The Vaults”… basically, I spin and remix a collection of my back-catalog material from a variety of projects that were never officially released, linked together with improvised live shards of my particular breed of lo-fi indie-electronic music. This is sort of like a bizarro take on a B-sides/ rarities/ out-takes/ greatest (non)hits collection, mashed up with my sort of gadfly take on the “live-mix” records that DJ’s more traditional-style than myself like to release. My plan is to release physical-copies of this disc in such a way that make it very unclear whether it’s more of a CD that comes with a one-of-a-kind piece of artwork, or a piece of art that comes with a free CD… or something in between, or both.



My new live-band is called Snazzmobb.

Expect a crazy-high-energy explosion of indie-dance-rock madness. We’re brand-spanking-new (and dealing with an unforeseen early-lineup restructuring issue at the moment) so we’re not playing out yet, but we will be soon. (I’ve already given my band-mates an ultimatum; if this isn’t going anywhere by early spring I’m heading someplace warmer). In the meantime, follow us on Twitter (@Snazzmobb) and “like” us on Facebook… we’ll be dropping plenty of teaser-content soon enough. Peel your eyes.

Snazzmobb is currently a trio; I'm on bass and vocals, Adhesiveslipper (solo-artist/ Headhat Records boss-man) is on electronic-noise-wizardry and vocals, and Alex Hurschman is on drums and vocals. Think high-energy noisy funk meets post-punk? This will be a fun show, I promise.



(the third installment of this update-series will cover visual-art and odds-and-ends, soon.)

Project-updates, Part 1.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a collected update here of the assortment of projects I currently have in the works. It seems overdue, since I have a lot going on, and only make passing mentions of various parts of these things in assorted places online. Here, then, is a bit of a catalog of my present endeavors, collected conveniently in one spot (though broken up into three entries to pardon your eyes and attention-spans.)


It might go without saying if you keep tabs on my work at all, but as someone who is rather transfixed with various ideas of “intermediality,” the media and format of most of my projects overlap and intersect with each other by design, concept, and necessity. Regardless, I will attempt to structure these updates by artistic-medium as an attempt at SOME semblance of coherency for those who happen to be outside of my head (you).


Writing-

I currently maintain four tiers of shorter-than-book-length content in various stages of the publication-submission process. These tiers are short-fiction, poetry, academic/ scholarly, and mainstream-non-fiction. In all of these tiers I try to maintain a sort of “go-big-or-go-home” submission-strategy… My thought is, why sell content to tiny, accessible outlets with extremely limited readership before you know for sure that the biggest fish in the sea don’t want the work… right? In certain tiers, then, I’ve been joking with friends lately that my current “job” as a writer is collecting rejection-letters from The New Yorker.


In addition, I’m currently working on a somewhat-unorthodox book-project. The piece is (at least tentatively) titled “Frantic Overture in Gray Minor: The Neon Sonata.” It’s not exactly a novel, not really a short-story collection, not quite a combination of the two… yet somehow all of that at once… with some additional intermedial, format-blurring twists thrown in.


My idea with this one, in terms of the goal, is self-publication… partly to help myself try to overcome a knee-jerk distaste for that “scene”… largely by allowing myself to think of that format as an experimental way of bypassing the conventional book-market in order to find unconventional sources of eyeballs for experimental works. In other words, this book is intentionally “unpublishable” by traditional “gate-keeper” publishing-industry channels, but possibly marketable to an entirely different sort of readers. (Of course, I’m well aware that this idea is particularly dicey at the moment, in the recent wake of the “50 Shades” phenomenon demonstrating so aptly WHY the traditional “quality-control” gate-keepers are in place- to keep the masses from hand-selecting complete and utter garbage… But I digress. I would be lying if I claimed that the challenge provided by such dicey-ness doesn’t excite me. I tend to like challenges.) This work is deeply connected to and overlapping with my current musical projects... which I'll talk about next.


…to be continued…

A Pair of Reviews, Part 2: Yeasayer, "Fragrant World."

The new Yeasayer disc, “Fragrant World,” is not technically a sophomore release (it’s actually the band’s third studio-record). However, it faces many of the same fabled pressures of an act’s second album, as it is the follow-up to 2010’s universally-acclaimed “Odd Blood,” which catapulted the group to “It-band” status (recent releases by Animal Collective and The Dirty Projectors, among others, face similar pressure.)

Yeasayer navigates this potentially-tense moment in their career brilliantly with “Fragrant World.” If the record lacks “Odd Blood”’s urgency (which to my ears it definitely does- there’s little if any of “Mondegreen” or “O.N.E.”’s edgy dance-rock here), this is instead a more confident, reflective, mature Yeasayer. Comparatively, this record is almost ‘laid back’… but not in a bad way.

To my ears, the most notable aspect of this album’s interest is the instrumentation. Yeasayer has managed something many musicians might find unthinkable here- somehow, they’ve stripped even more of the ‘organic’ instruments from their mix (I can only locate a couple brief snippets of sound of this disc that I’m entirely confident are made by guitars) while making a record that I would be FAR less comfortable describing as ‘electronic’ than their last. This is not a synth record, this is not an electro record, this is DEFINITELY not a dance or EDM record. This is a well-written psychedelic indie-pop record constructed largely from a palette of ‘What the hell makes THAT noise?’ sounds. 

In my eyes, it’s about time that rock songwriting caught up with hip-hop production in this regard. This is a ‘think outside the box’ record that amazingly manages not to SOUND like one, unless you’re either stubbornly partial to the safety of the box, or you’re paying close attention to the xylophones, pizzicato, noise-swells, glitches, melodica, etcetera that sit in the spaces that guitars might otherwise go. This album should be required-listening for every musician in a guitar-bass-drum cliché-format rock band, to fuel a little thought toward how their songs are put together, and why. 

Oh, and those sub-hits throughout are IMPRESSIVELY low. 

A Pair of Reviews, Part 1: Bloc Party, "Four."

I haven’t reviewed anything here in a while. I think it’s probably overdue. I picked up a couple of highly-anticipated new records this week, so I’ll give you my take on two releases back-to-back.

The first, today, will be the new Bloc Party record, “Four.” I’ll follow that in short order with a completely contrasting spin on the new Yeasayer, “Fragrant World.”

To anyone who kept tabs at all on the hiatus/ feud/ reunion/ recording-process drama leading up to the new Bloc Party disc (played out extensively in the music press, on Twitter, etc.) we have to realize really quickly that we’re in for a bumpy ride with this record when the first thing that comes out of the speakers when you pop it in is ambient, “behind-the-scenes”-ish recording-studio sounds. Uh oh. They’re drawing our attention from the get-go to the notoriously tumultuous recoding-process (and these noises continue intermittently between tracks throughout.) Buckle up.

I’m just going to have right out with it- this is quite possibly one of the most confusing records I’ve ever heard. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t entirely “dislike” it… But the reasons that I kind of “like” it have to do with being a long-term Bloc Party fan sort of witnessing a documentation of an attempt to make a record by four people who are very obviously no longer on the same page musically. I find it more fascinating than listenable, and I have a hunch that most listeners who haven’t followed the ebbs and flows of this band’s career are going to be listening to this one wondering what the hell they just purchased.

We had all heard the rumors that, after each previous release got progressively more electronic (amidst certain mumblings that the rest of the band may not have been thrilled with frontman Kele Okereke’s leadership in this regard) that this record was going to be something of a “return to rock” for the band. I think many of us assumed (for better or worse) that this meant something of a return to the post-punk of “Silent Alarm.” “Four” is most definitely NOT that. In fact, as much as it’s a departure from anything even remotely electronic, it’s somehow an even MORE drastic departure from anything even remotely similar to the band’s sound prior to getting all “dancey.”

In short, this record not only sounds like the band is going through motions… but those “motions” seem to be based on fragmented, disjointed whims. Stylistically, this thing is ALL over the map. Sure, there are chunks of post-punk thrown in, but less Gang of Four and more Sonic Youth/ Refused… mixed haphazardly with shards of things like syncopated jazz with… is that a banjo??, shimmering atmospheric yet uneventful shoe-gaze, and more than a few moments that sound downright… wait for it… heavy metal??? (The album‘s closer, “We’re Not Good People” seems to be pretty much a disingenuously-earnest parody of a thrash-metal song, while the second track, “___” seems to channel Merciful Fate/ King Diamond?) For an apt example of just how extreme this awkward stylistic-mashup gets, cue up “Coliseum.” I hate saying this, because I still love this band, but hearing a British indie band trying to sound like southern-American blues-rock/ groove-metal is just downright cringe-inducing. This is probably all-around one of the worst songs I’ve heard in a while. (I HOPE this track is supposed to be a joke, but if it is, Bloc Party’s taken the “dry” in “dry British humour” to unprecedented extremes.) The tracks on the record that sound most like “Bloc Party” (in ANY of the band’s prior forms) sound fragmentary, unfinished, incomplete… they all seem to either fade out or end abruptly just as they feel like they’re about to turn into something memorable or catchy. (Oddly, the two most fully-realized Bloc Party-esque tracks are the two additional songs on my limited-edition copy, which don’t appear on the regular version of the disc. These ["Mean” and "Leaf Skeleton”] sound like the products of, say, “A[nother] Weekend in the City” era of the band, with an even greater dose of Joy Division influence?)

Here’s my hunch on this one- the crux of the issue here is the role that Kele plays in relation to on songs-of-Bloc-Party-past. If you follow the evolution of Bloc Party’s sound prior to this album, the front man’s solo-record while the band was on hiatus, “The Boxer,” WAS the next Bloc Party record. And it was brilliant.

Comparatively, Kele’s power as a vocalist just doesn’t show up on “Four.” Without hearing “The Boxer,” some listeners might think that during the band’s hiatus the singer had somehow lost the energy in his voice, which has always been one of the band’s trademarks. He never leans into his parts at all, and those parts are leveled FAR lower and less dominantly in the audio-mix than on any prior Bloc Party disc. Content-wise, both tonally and lyrically, Kele’s contributions are far more dark, cynical, and often downright angry than we’ve seen from him prior. Kele sounds very much like he checked out on the creative-process for this album, and I would wager that his contributions to the musical writing-process were far less than on past efforts. Let’s face it; following up “The Boxer,” Kele has quite a bit of possible time left in him as an indie-chameleon golden-child… the other three members of the band? Probably less so. It seems like he threw up his hands and said something along the lines of “Let’s let these kids make the record that they want to make, and I’ll just drop some vocals over the top.” The resulting album is definitely interesting… but extremely problematic.

That being said, I’d love to see what the rest of the band does in the inevitable post-Kele era. I’m hoping for something in line with Bauhaus post-Peter Murphy as Tones on Tail/ Love and Rockets, or Johnny Marr post-Smiths, personally.

Headhat For Cats.

Headhat Records and Starving Raptors have teamed up to release an AMAZING charity-compilation, to benefit the New Hampshire SPCA. That's right, it's for kitties (and other animals).

This thing is, no exaggeration, 66 tracks long, and clocks in at almost 4 hours. It's only $5, which goes entirely to the charity, and features some phenomenal material.

My experimental-electronic outfit LeVautourEnsemble has a previously-unreleased, exclusive, otherwise-unheard track on this thing, called "Mamihlapinataei: Searching For Words In Other Tongues"... among an amazingly-diverse cast of characters, featuring some big names in indie-hip-hop, underground-celeb-types, and tracks that you probably haven't heard (but probably should) from as far away as Belgium, Australia, Japan... There's lots of exclusive content on this thing, and lots of things you'll hear and wonder how you POSSIBLY could have managed to sleep on up until now... Really, this is a QUALITY mix, from start to finish, that you absolutely need to hear.

Download it now here. (Dropped yesterday, MayDay, through Starving Raptors, available through Headhat later in the month.)

Audio/ Visual: Multimedia Versus Intermediality?

As someone whose academic and artistic work tends to revolve around various critical concepts of intermediality, with a general and passionate fixation on the blurring of mediums and boundaries between disciplines, I have a somewhat awkward confession to make.

Honestly, there are times when pop-culture's (and particularly consumer-culture's) emphasis on the "multi-media" weirds me the hell out.

I feel like a bit of a hypocrite saying this, back-pedalling, trying to explain how what I'm referring to is somehow different from what "I" do, as I research the role of music in Literature or vice-versa, or stress the importance of videos I make for a more thorough understanding of my musical-output that they accompany... (I know. How very un-post-modern [or un-post-post-modern/ un-"reconstructionist"] of me to try to distance my own work from pop-culture. This is an observation, not a theory, so I offer no direct apology). It is what it is.

I first jotted some of these thoughts down in a notebook a few years ago, while I was searching for a gift for a family-member. I was looking for an electronic-device that performed a single task in a simple, easy-to-use manner. I had owned a similar device years prior, so I knew that the technology existed... and honestly, as a musician who's a bit of a gear-nerd, I knew of quite a few ways to accomplish the task in question. Problem was, at the time, there were plenty of devices on the market that could handle this simple audio task.... in addition to a plethora of other far more complicated tasks that wouldn't be used and would render the device far too uselessly complex for the person it was intended for. Poking around in the stereo-equipment section, I was invariably directed to the "home theatre" section, to which I groaned. "Oh, we have plenty of things that do that... as a side-effect of all this neat video-stuff that they can also do!" Another groan. "No, those features will not be used." I wanted a device that accomplished a strictly-audio task simply and efficiently. There was nothing on the market at the time that did what I wanted it to (outboard, without needing to be plugged into a computer) that didn't also have a visual-component.

For some reason, these frustrations led me to think of how distasteful I found the "Bohemian Rhapsody" sequence of "Wayne's World" the first time I saw it. The Queen song had long-conjured its own set of mental images for me. The aesthetics associated with that song in the film, Garth and Wayne headbanging, provided such a harsh juxtaposition with my own imaginative constructs for the song. Afterward, it irked  me irrationally and uncontrollably to no end that, among kids my age, whenever that song came on, the point-of-reference was inevitably "Wayne's World," rather than the dense operatic aesthetic landscape I'd constructed in my mind. {for the record, this no longer bothers me in the least. I was pretty young when that movie came out, and "A Night at the Opera" was the first record I ever purchased, so childhood feelings about this subject were rather biased and passionate.}

{contrast audio-associated aesthetic imagery and perceive intermedial dischord.}

{On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm developing an ever-more-detailed theory about how much you can tell about a person based on their opinion of Queen. I'm only partially kidding.}

Similarly, around the same time, I heard an article on NPR about how Disney's "Fantasia" shaped the way that entire generations qualified classical music with aesthetic imagery. (I think it was this article.) Although I found this story/ review fascinating, it also made me feel somewhat dirty. There's something deeply strange about how this classical content, works by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky, etc, was reshuffled, repurposed, re-imagined, and re-aestheticized forever in the collective consciousness.... by a cartoon. 

As Lloyd Schwartz says in his NPR review of the Fantasia rerelease,  "for kids, it's a delightful introduction to classical music. But both Fantasia films reveal how difficult it is to arrive at convincing images. Visual artists have to be deeply sensitive to music not to oversimplify, or betray, what's so deeply in the music." Maybe that's part of my discomfort, and the distinction I can't help but draw in my mind- pop-culture's use of "multi-media" tends to super-impose and interpret between mediums, whereas "intermediality" perceives and utilizes multiple mediums as components of an over-arching whole, multiple ways of understanding the same content, an ability for aspects of one medium to say things unable to be expressed with another, rather than a botched-translation from one format to another as if the vocabularies were entirely and seamlessly congruent? (See Deleuze and Guattari on mimicry versus Becoming?)

{I'm using this particular example not because it's the best-known and most narratively-accessible sequence from the film, but because the source-material for the musical-composition is literary [Goethe], which provides an additional layer of multi-media/ intermedial complication.}

I'll be the first to admit that, in all of these examples, the role of capitalism in our cultural reception of art is a large aspect of what I find off-putting... "You NEED more features... Why WOULDN'T we want our stuff to do more stuff??"... classic works of art repackaged and resold in more digestible forms to cater to a larger swath of the consumer population, scarring the new image-associations simultaneously to the parts of our brains receptive to the music, blocking our cognitive ability to let the music speak its own language... etcetera... {Breathe.}

Are these the only distinctions, though? As always, the line between audio (or any other medium) as product and audio as art is really blurry. I'm constantly trying to figure out where that line is, and how to most effectively discern and distinguish the force-fed "multi-media" that makes me feel like a dirty manipulated consumer from the uses of intermediality and the blurrings of boundaries between disciplines and distinctions that I find so vital and mentally-invigorating... Yet at the same time I'm entirely unsure as to why this line needs to be drawn or clarified at all. 

In the meantime, exploring observational knee-jerks is always something I find important. 

{Now, to cleanse your pallet, a bit of multi-media mind-candy I stumbled on while writing.}

"Nails Dig In" writing-soundtrack....

I recently finished the first completed draft of a piece of short fiction that I'd had in the works for quite a while. I'm in the process of sending it out to some gracious readers willing to provide some feedback for future edits, help me get it out of my own head for a bit...

In the meantime, I figure I may as well share an idiosyncratic yet essential aspect of my writing-process. Many of my pieces of writing are composed to a dedicated "soundtrack;" as a musician and a writer in whose writing music and sound tends to play a large role, it's essential for me that the piece that I'm working on maintain a particular "sound" in the style that it's written in. Most of the "tone" of my writing is based first-and-foremost on sound. Therefore, I make a playlist of the sound and tone that I'm trying to achieve (often, like this one, including songs of my own that were composed exclusively for the purpose of capturing and understanding the "sound" of the piece of writing at hand [not all of my own pieces on this list were composed explicitly for that purpose however, some just fit the mood well] ) and listen to that exclusively while writing and editing.

Here is, then, the "soundtrack/ playlist" for a piece titled "Nails Dig In (In The Mouth of the Wolf)."

(wink/ hint/ wink to those who stumble on this while helping me edit/ reading for submission/ reading the work if it happens to get published somewhere; these tracks also feature/ include a few easter-egg internal-references within the work that add additional layers of meaning.)

1) LeVautourEnsemble- Physical Consent

2) The Stiletto Formal- ...tastes like black licorice

3) Placebo- Protect Me From What I Want

4) LeVautourEnsemble- Hybrid Eyes

5) Crystal Castles- Not In Love (feat. Robert Smith)

6) Miike Snow- Plastic Jungle

7) LeVautourEnsemble- Mamihlapinatapei; Searching For Words In Other Tongues. 

(Sorry, this one is currently unavailable. It's slated for a forthcoming compilation as a "previously unreleased" track, and it wouldn't quite be "unreleased" if I dropped it here, now would it? ;) )

8) Bright Eyes- Lover I Don't Have To Love

9) Yeasayer- O.N.E.

10) LeVautourEnsemble with Antoine 518- Wave (Our Confusion Is Just What We Need)

(this is another in the previously-unreleased category, this one a recent collab-track, but I'm dropping this one here. That's right, this is exclusive-type-shit. Brand new, just for you.)

11) Bloc Party- Like Eating Glass 

12) The Strays- Life Support

13) The Mars Volta- Ilyena

Crazy Chicken Prints now available on Etsy!

Because the logistics of selling mail-order art baffle me a bit, I finally broke down, revived my long-dormant Paypal account, and started an Etsy shop.

At the moment this shop is just for the variations on the Crazy-Chicken photo-reproduction prints that I've recently posted about making available (there are two different designs now!), but in the future I may or may not make one-of-a-kind pieces available here too, if there's interest in that sort of thing.

Check it out, here-

"Watching the Bridge Come Down; A Tribute."

(I haven't posted any poetry here in a while... largely because my writing-output mostly veers in alternate directions these days. I do have a couple pieces in the pipeline for attempted publication at the moment... but here's one that I wrote off-the-cuff after watching a Portsmouth, NH landmark, the Memorial Bridge, being dismantled last week. Figured I'd post it here as a sort of an homage.)

Watching the Bridge Come Down;

A Tribute.

We take a pilgrimage to the port,

It seems like it just has to happen.

There’s something symbolic, as we’re

Standing in the crowd on the pier,

Watching the trusses taken apart,

Broken down and placed onto the barge below.

We’re loudly cracking jokes, saying how

We want to see an explosion,

Something cathartic,

Pissing off the old-people,

Keeping their odd and silent vigil. 

But that’s our role here,

As we retreat to a bar to follow

Our own sort of vigil with beer...

Our own sort of tribute.

This is our city, our pier,

Our bridge, our bricks,

Our own pieces of rusted, incompetent steel.

And none of us want to say

(but we’re all thinking)

That there’s something important

About the idea that the 

Bridge isn’t burning 

Or exploding

But being gradually taken apart, 

To be casually, slowly, cast down the stream,

That resonates for us in a way where

We don’t really want to

Verbally express the connections

We can’t help but draw in our minds. 

Prints!

My infamous "crazy chicken" design is now available as a limited-edition custom print!

Think of this as the LeVautour equivalent of the soup-can or Obey-giant. THIS is my pop-art manifesto. Get with it.

$10 for a basic, unframed, 8x10 matte or glossy print. Framing options, custom colors, bizarro printing options (I'll find a way to put this on ANYTHING you want...) are totally available, and pricing is negotiable. Get at me. 

bernard.levautour@yahoo.com

New LeVautourEnsemble record out now!

My solo musical outfit, LeVautourEnsemble, has just released our second record, "Machinique Meltdown," on the world-infamous Headhat Records!

Like the first LeVautourEnsemble record, (2010's long-delayed "...whose wings are a dull reality"... as well as Tipsy Cougar's notoriously chaotic 2011 album "Immaculate Conceptions" and a ton of other awesome and awesomely-odd stuff) this one is available to download for FREE/ donation through the "webhat" imprint. Download it here.... now. Because I said so. I mean, it's free, what do you have to lose??

Predictably, this record is an odd one. It's sorta-kinda a concept-record. It's sorta-kinda a response to a perverse challenge (I like challenges). It's sorta-kinda a hip-hop record (?!?) (emphasis on the sorta-kinda). It's sorta-kinda a whole bunch of things that it's really not at all. 

As many who know me personally are probably aware, I get a strange sort of thrill from finding new odd-ball accolades for my press-kits ("... like a young CC Deville wielding an out-of-control fire-hose," anyone? "...mystical..."? lol) Well, from this one so far I've gotten an absolute GEM courtesy of Headhat label-boss/ noise-beat virtuoso Adhesiveslipper. (as if I needed MORE reasons to love Headhat to death.) This record, apparently...  "has the headiest liner-notes of any record we've released so far." I'll take it! Thanks Dan! (To the rest of you, please take that as a challenge to listen to this record and give it the most out-there review [good, bad, outraged, indifferent, wtf, whatever]. It probably deserves it, and I'd love to hear what you think.)

Since I know that very few people even OPEN the file with the liner-notes in it for digital-downloads, I may as well just post those notes here, give you a taste of what this thing is about, what you're getting your eardrums into with this one....

LeVautourEnsemble- Machinique Meltdown

“Machinic, a word that does not exist, translates the French machinique, the adjectival form of le machin, a gadget, a watchamacallit.”  

This footnote from editor/ translator Robert Brinkley’s notations to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s 1975 essay “What Is A Minor Literature?” provides part of the title and a sort of a point-of-departure for this collection of songs and sounds. 

This album was spawned as an outlet for a meltdown of various sorts, in the immediate aftermath of a graduate-literature program which found me, by the end of the final semester, deeply immersed in attempting to understand and apply the critical-theory of Delueze and Guattari to a variety of research, writing, and art projects... resulting in a sort of troubling void where Deleuzian concepts such as rhizomatic mapping, deteretorialization, assemblages, “becoming,” and, of course, the ever-elusive “machinique,” acquired vast  degrees of personal resonance on many different levels. 

The resulting album was initially intended as a concept-record about varying sorts of apocalypses. In its finished form, in many ways it is this indeed... though, in true Deleuzian form, in a far more confusing, meandering, and easily-misunderstandable way than initially intended. You could probably refer to each resulting “song” on this short album as a “Plateau,” (and you probably wouldn’t be entirely wrong)... but I’d kind of prefer that you didn’t. 

This album was recorded between January 2011 and December 2011, primarily at the LoftDeLeVautour, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. All instruments, sounds, voices, noises, etc were performed, created, and/ or mutated and heavily manipulated by Bernard P. Provencher LeVautour. 

Again, in true Deleuzian fashion, I choose to refuse to explain anything about any track on this album with any further degree of detail within these notations. 

Questions may be addressed directly by email, at bernard.levautour@yahoo.com




For a taste of the record, as your download is downloading, and a taste for the accompanying video-footage (If I remember right, there's some sort of video or other for the vast majority of the tracks on this record if you visit my Youtube channel)... here's the intro-track, and the outro-track. Believe it or not, I totally feel that, over the course of the record, the transition between the two begins to make a little bit of sense.

(LeVautourEnsemble- Preface)

(LeVautourEnsemble- Hybrid Eyes)