2LP with screen printed artwork, limited to 150 copies
Vrystaete makes a second appearance this week with a career-spanning retrospective of French post-industrial, ambient-adjacent duo, Jérôme Chassagnard and Régis Baille AKA Ab Ovo. Because this is Vrystaete, the emphasis is, at first, more decidedly on the post-industrial than the ambient, a gesture towards the dark more than the light, embracing the more ethereal side of post-club sonics in the same way Coil, Psychic TV and the like did in the mid-to-late 90s, too. And because Le Temps Retrouvé is presented in chronological order, you can also spot when Chassagnard and Baille's interests started to shift, clearly embracing IDM and its attendant braindance rewiring of all manner of electronic sounds - ambient, drone, breakbeat, glitch++ It finds a sweet spot between Korm Plastics and early Warp in a similar way to which we might possibly understand Coil offshoots The Eskaton or O Yuki Conjugate's experiments with more extroverted ambient aesthetics with Ocean Youth Club and Open Yellow Circle. Commendable comparisons all, but still the best compliment you can send Ab Ovo's way is that they didn't stand still, their status as music fans as much as music makers written across this evolving catalogue.
