Sonic Area
And Shadow
Ant-Zen
Arnaud Coëffic’s Sonic Area project has long held an experimental brand of minimalism as its dominant style. Ostensibly linking downtempo, technoid, and ambient traditions, what is pared away in the French producer’s work often feels more important than what remains. Compared to the ghostly nullification of 2021’s Ki new LP And Shadow is bursting with immediacy, yet ultimately prompts similar reflections on minimalism itself.
The moody opener “Epiphany” is a great reminder of the pure technical skill for which Coëffic uses Sonic Area as a clearing house, establishing a balance between precise, wooden yet rubbery percussion and melancholy harmony. “Spiritus Contra Spiritum” makes a shift from the tense, clipped bursts which would have placed Coëfficin line with the Alchemists supergroup a decade back into a fluid lope evoking island steel drums. Shifts and equanimity aren’t the only technique And Shadow succeeds at, though.
The tinkling pings of “The Rope Dancer” recall the tonal and rhythmic precision of classic Kraftwerk passed through a buffer of cinematic drum flurries and modern electropop sound design which sound far denser than they actually are if one cares to forego the buffeting jostle and chaos the arrangement conjures. That same addition by subtraction principle can also be found on the delicate cutting on a pair of leads on “Parallax” which leads to Reich-like phasing (more on that in a minute), The grandeur of penultimate track “The Living Mandala” seems to be moving towards the full, rich interplay between rhythm, timbre and harmony the album has cagily avoided, before a closing dialectic between a call to heavenly tranquility and the need to address the titular Jungian element of ourselves reminds us that forsaking reality and suffering for the sake of idealized bliss has always been a narcotizing illusion.
I’m writing this on a train to Toronto the day after seeing a performance of Steve Reich’s “New York Counterpoint”, a piece calling for a live clarinet to accompany no less than eleven recordings of other clarinets intricately moving in and out of rhythm with one another. The brand of minimalism Coëffic is known for and which is bent to a specific purpose on And Shadow is perhaps different from Reich’s – “New York Counterpoint” gestures toward the attack and decay of electronic synthesis via acoustic instrumentation, while And Shadow takes decades of electronic dance music tradition as a given and unnerves by stripping away much of what is presumed to be integral to it. These are radically different agendas yet the combination of mind bending complexity and elegant simplicity both call for speaks to the paradoxes inherent in any music which has ever been deemed “minimal”.
