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Automatisme
Transit
Constellation - 2018
Michael Panontin
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Under the name Automatisme, William Jourdain has a Bandcamp page that stretches all the way back to 2013, starting with the little-known - but frankly phenomenal - Automatisme 1 EP and running right past 2016's Momentform Accumulations, his first effort for Montreal's Constellation label. So by rights the talented Quebecker should be a household name amongst fans of glitch, ambient and drone electronics, right up there with the likes of Pan Sonic, Matmos or any of the artists on the illustrious Mille Plateaux roster. As it stands, though, the reclusive Jourdain chooses to spend much of his time in the tiny burg of Saint-Hyacinthe, nestled on the 20 about halfway between Montreal and Drummondville, churning out tracks and hawking vinyl at the local record shop, Frequences Le Disquaire.
Transit is a departure of sorts from the alternating lulling/jarring sounds on Momentform Accumulations. Both records seem to nod back a couple of decades to the early nineties, a time when electronic music was probably at its most popular. But whereas the previous disc owed much to Aphex Twin and his subtler textures, Transit is an unsettling assault of noise and drone that wouldn't be so out of place in the catalogue of the masters themselves, Newcastle's :zoviet*france:.
Transit actually started to take shape a few years back while Jourdain was collecting sounds at various transportation hubs around the province. "All tracks are based from transit sites field recordings and from patches of modular digital instruments," he explained. "The field recordings and visuals are all coming from non-places such as bridges, roads and underpasses in Saint-Hyacinthe. Also, they come from waiting rooms at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal and from the offices of a contemporary art gallery."
It certainly doesn't take long for Jourdain to state his case. Just 56 seconds into the opening track, the listener is whacked with a cacophonous belt of sound somewhere between a skipping CD and a machine gun attack. This segues into a pair of moody sets called 'Bureau 1-3' and 'Bateau 1-2', both of which evoke an array of post-industrial imagery from desolate moonscapes to factory floors. The highlight here is easily the thrilling 'Bureau 1', an eerie soundscape situated somewhere between Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks and the Newcastle drone kings' long-forgotten 1991 thriller, Shadow, Thief of the Sun. Effing brilliant.
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Automatisme
Constellation
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