“Errance Planetaire is a stunning album which deserves to be discover by those who have enjoyed at madness the best years of Space Rock”
1 Eclat Stellaire 4:58 2 Useful Happiness 6:00 3 En attendant 6:42 4 Exoplanete 1 6:10 5 The Sputnik 1 Effect 5:10 6 Godspeed John Glenn 5:56 7 L'exode 3:49 8 The Blue Marble 7:06 9 Our Legacy 4:32 10 Flying Turtles 2:34 Mutagenese Music
(DDL 52:58) (V.F.) (Space Rock)
While I'm speaking constantly about EM produced in Europe or in the States, I forget that some very good projects are blooming so near me. After the superb Ordo ab Chao from Samarkande, a new musical project bursts out in Montreal under the name of Mutagénèse. Released at the very beginning of the last autumn, ERRANCE PLANETAIRE is a nice album built on analog tones which makes us travel among the big essences of Space Rock, of ambient music and of good old Berlin School. And in spite of these essences many times revisited, the Montreal group proposes a first album where its 10 titles are soaked with a freshness both at the level of the creativity as with the sound aestheticism.
It's with an ambient approach that begins this album. Eclat Stellaire reveals wide fields of mist filled of tones and of sonic oddities which float with fascinating harmonious fragments in an electronic landscape populated of neutrality. Useful Happiness extracts some foggy ideas from Eclat Stellaire to paint its introduction of mysticism. Some threads escape from there and weave a slight movement of staccato. The duel of the tones is very ear-catchy, here as everywhere in ERRANCE PLANETAIRE. Percussions put themselves in mode beating, introducing a rhythm of the analog years which goes and comes between a foggy symphony. The 2nd part takes advantage of its additional elements percussive and of the more crystalline echoes of the sequences to attract us better in the universe of a very good album without temporal dimension. En attendant thwarts this perception with a charmingly lively structure of rhythm which makes very Jarre, otherwise an EM of the French school. I warn you; the melody is the type of musical itch. Exoplanet 1 is at the opposite with this secluded guitar which adorns its introduction. This ambient and melodious opening is assailed by a sequence of percussions which drum on a long interval only interrupted by the finale. Cabalistic tears of synth roam with a fascinating complicity with the guitar, whereas wide banks of mist lay down fathomless melodies and that some strange murmurs amplify this very sibylline approach of Exoplanet 1. So strange and so good! Cracklings and voices lost in limbo open the groggy walking of The Sputnik 1 Effect. The effects are in accordance with the title while the music proposes two synth lines among which the circles which are melting in each of them form the base of a ghost rhythm. It's the percussions which raise a rhythmic pattern hopping in a kind of motorik beat, whereas the chirpings of the synths take care of creating a very efficient melodious line, eater of eardrums, which is equivalent to those EM hits in the 70's. Simple but really effective. One dances and whistles on the airs of this title. And then we are heading in a more ambiospherical, more progressive, even complex phase of ERRANCE PLANETAIRE.
Funereal and melancholic floating lines, as well as voices of the NASA, feed the introduction of Godspeed John Glenn. These lines move like circular waves, teaming up in a fascinating symbiosis with others in tones of an electronic elephant like in the opening of Jean-Michel Jarre's Ethnicolor. A beating in the background gets out of the shadow and shapes a more fluid approach which melt in the increasing of the dialogues and in another line of oscillatory rhythm which communicates with an extraterrestrial organic structure. Godspeed John Glenn ends in a passage surprisingly realistic of this vision described by those who saw the void and the light before returning among us. The short L'exode proposes a rhythm which hops like in a race against time where orchestral layers and others more restrained are weaving a sound panorama near the terrors of Suspiria. The vibes here are great. The Blue Marble is a title of ambiences with pure celestial orchestrations which float and waltz until they meet a 2nd part which exploits percussive effects tinkling and resounding in these orchestrations as slow and seraphic as in the opening. What will be our legacy to the future generations? That's the question of Our Legacy which arouses the reflections narrated on the splendid shape of a rhythm which sounds so much like in the analog years. This is a little wonder which reminds me of the Space Art years! And Flying Turtles is not outdone with its cosmic rhythm structured on the movement of carillon from a sequencer loaded of reveries. The synth layers are waltzing with this pace of a gracious ballerina whose slow movements are followed by a hallucinogenic powder. Another small gem!
Sometimes in its psychedelic perfumes and sometimes in its cosmic vapors, the music of ERRANCE PLANETAIRE roams between as many genres as the 10 proposed titles. There are moments of innocence here which flirt with a creativity as much more grandiloquent than this complicity which unites both poles. And this fact is of an ingenuity quite close to the one of god Chronos.
Sylvain Lupari (February 21st, 2018) *****
Available at Mutagénèse Bandcamp
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