Anne Gillis - Vhoysee

Partially confusing time spanning collection of both new and old Anne Gillis music from Art into Life, continuing their long-standing relationship with the French provocateur. Vhoysee is perhaps best seen as an attempt to recontextualise Gillis' work while tying up some loose ends at the same time. We get four tracks from her self-released debut cassette from 1983, a collection so obscure the songs didn't even make it to the 5CD boxset Art into Life issued in 2015, alongside six contemporary pieces. The result is somewhat disorientating, detailing a restless artist investigating and probing away deep within the margins. The early recordings, probably unsurprisingly so given the period from which they come, broadly fit within the context of the European tape underground,, home recorded minimal synth experiments that both charm and unnerve in equal measure, landing somewhere between the otherworldly sounds of Roberto Musci and the greyscale elan of Saskia, NSRD, Hessel Veldman et al. The newer material is more confounding still, Gillis sounding increasingly alien and dream-haunted, a purgatorial chauntese communicating from the in-between. This has probably long been a busy field, but it does feel as if there's a lot of music of this kind being made of late - it's kind of the alternative pop form of our era: from HTRK to Carla dal Forno to Inga Copeland to Nina Harker and so forth - but there's something particularly other about Gillis' work, the sense of a singular artist traipsing the outskirts in pursuit solely of their own very specific desires. You could easily imagine Gillis keeping this work entirely private, so little does she demand an audience. We should consider ourselves fortunate for being allowed to listen in,