gilles poizat | champignon flamme @ bluebunny (uk)

An album of concepts for trumpet and modular synth. It doesn’t quite say that in in the press release but that description just about sums up “Champignon Flamme” by Gilles Poizat.

As you might therefore expect, this album is on the train to a station named avant-garde and, while the familiarity of melody isn’t quite abandoned, it isn’t the core of these six songs. Worshippers of conventionality may well find themselves confused by the lack of planned waypoints on this sonic journey but it has to be the said that this is still a journey that is quite easy to enjoy. There are, for example, elements of soundtrack parallelism as the robotic pitch patterns draw energy from long forgotten science fiction films that only ever seemed to find their true home on VHS yet the result always seems more than the result of a man versus machine shootout.

No doubt deliberately fragmented to distance the music from reality, “Champignon Flamme” works best in the dark when all those pulsating beeps and bongs escape their digital prison to ricochet around the room in a vainglorious search for spiritual identity.