Couteau / Haute Forme
Airfono (66 mins)
Super Parquet command the confluence of Auvergnat folk, art and club music, creating their own unique soundflow. This follow-up to their 2019 debut is actually two complementary albums in one. The first part, Couteau, continues where they left off, with acoustic timbres of cabrette (bagpipes), boîte à bourdon (drone hurdy-gurdy) and banjo clashing with astringent electronics and effects, building up short ostinati into overwhelming textures with agonising dissonances and distortions, with traditional song cutting through here and there. It’s ever-evolving, ever-building and absolutely brilliant. It feels somewhat like a mirror-image of ambient music: its construction and impact are very similar, but its sound is anything but relaxing.
The relationship with ambient music gets much closer on Haute Forme. It takes the shape of a single 38-minute piece (split into two by the limitations of vinyl), starting with pumping, phasing cardiorhythms and screeching proto-melodies that eventually mellow into a wide-open soundscape. With another transformation, it becomes a bourrée macabre before this too dissolves into unstoppable, suffocating repetition until there is nothing but pulse and drone. Then silence.
For this double-album, the ideal listening experience is one of sensory overload and deprivation: play as loud as possible in a pitch-black environment. The constant looping can be brain-jamming. It fills the skull – Super Parquet’s music almost physically demands one’s full attention.