Marie De la Nuit - Transportées

Highly disorientating but utterly engaging sound design verite from Marie Guérin under her assumed de la Nuit sobrioquet, which maps her fitful passage through Brittany, Germany and Tunisia. Local voices cut in an out, sometimes in indigenous song, sometimes abstracted beyond comprehension, intersecting with the manipulation of an array of field recordings that are often trance-like in their arrangement. Guérin in part describes her practice as 'documentary', and there is certainly a sense of something of the wider world being recorded here, of its ebbs and flows, of its langauge and expression, and, ultimately, whether observed or otherwise, its persistent fecundity. Might we call this Abstract Ethnography? It does seem to aptly capture Guérin's intentions quite well, to map, reflect and celebrate polyglot oral traditions and the distinct sound worlds they create. Struggling to think of another record this is exactly like, which likely tells us that Transportées works best through telling its own specific story of the worlds it's encountered.