review – 29 Palms (der) 2010 – by Allen Lockett – Igloo Magazine

29 Palms, i8u on Dragon’s Eye Recordings

Montreal-based France Jobin has been active since 1999, with albums on labels like Bake/Staalplaat, Room40, nvo, Atak, and Vague Terrain. Specializing in “sound-sculpture” in her i8u guise, she’s aided and abetted here by California’s Joshua Tree national park, whence she drew both inspiration and field recordings, edited and processed into the spatial environments of 29 Palms. Its single long format tract eschews a linear narrative in favour of ineffable dwellings and unwonted divergences; for all that it dwells on spaces it creates, its audio-visualizations constantly shift, between deeply textured dronal swells and billows and attenuated higher end microsonics – binaries that Jobin stitches together into audio tableaux that are at once evacuated and replete, expansive and intimate. Poking discreetly into the interstices of lower spectrum digital and analogue tone, softly prodding pulses and held back bass gesture, the trajectory of 29 Palms describes a event horizon onto which microvariations hove into view; ambiguous atmospheres unfolding out of a seemingly infinitely creatively configurable trio of materials – synthetic sustain, wavering tonalities and digital crackle – that commingle with occasional emergent harmonics. It rises and falls, building into whirling dirges (clip below), softening to mid-range pulse, descending into spectral sound and liminal near silence. Appeal – no soundalike reference intended – will be to those who cherish the likes of Richard Chartier through to William Basinski, to the ear that cleaves to a certain desertification, and the expressivity of absence.

 

Igloo Magazine

Everestrecords – terrestre

New album out by MATHON on the 29. April 2011 on Everestrecords
with remixes by Steinbrüchel, Digitalis, Kenneth Kirschner, i8u, Tobias Reber, Matu and Elektrohandel.

Pre-order on Junodownload and Vinyl pro-order here: http://everestrecords.greedbag.com/buy/terrestre-0/

The project Mathon has its name from a beautiful place in the Swiss Alps. Every year since 2003 Thomas  Augustiny,
Roger Stucki and Pete Leuenberg meet there and invite different musicians, to translate the impressive sur rounding into music. The conceptual project is ambient music by its original definition : spaces becomes sound and sound generates space.

This way four albums have been recorded, together with Ronny Spiegel, Maria Capelli, Nocolas Kellner and Maurice de Martin. The growing interest for the visualisation of the music, lead to  installation for Etoy, HKB
for the museum for communication.

The pieces of the current release were remixed by international known musicians like; Kenneth Kirschner, i8u, Steinbrüchel or Digitalis.

preview on iTunes