L'Ocelle Mare - Sans Chemin

Wonderful 15-song compositional suite from Thomas Bonvalet's L'Ocelle Mare project, now finding its way to vinyl some six months after its initial release via Shelter Press. There's a very utilitarian approach to nomenclature on Sans Chemin - each track is named after the instruments used in its construction - which disguises some very skillful and experimental expressions from Bonvalet. You might mostly understand this as sound design, texture, tone and timbre instead of structure the focus, and while Bonvalet's work is abstract in form, it's also emotionally rich, rhythmically engaging and invariably melodic. There's an almost Recihian use of percussion on tracks like Métronome, Guitare, Scotch De Peintre, Membranes, though it's also underscored with dissonance and a mischievous spirit, a few strategically placed ghosts in the machine pulling at the wrong strings. What's more, despite seeming like a collection of discrete recordings, there's a real sense of journey through the record, moving from discord to a kind of fractured harmony as it concludes, another contemporary record that makes me think of The Books, which is never a bad thing.