Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear sells you a psychotropic experience and calls it an album. “Ar Ker” by Seb Brun isn’t exactly that psychotropic experience but there is something about it that detaches you from reality.
Perhaps Seb Brun is a child borne of the arthouse for these eights songs are less about encouraging you to sing along in joyful harmony than to provide a sonic enchantment that will draw you into his world. I say there are eight songs because it says so on the label yet there is a sense of oneness that merges these songs together into a road map to somewhere else with that somewhere else being, in my magic mushroom head, a spiritual destination.
The looped and sequenced pacing increases with robotic precision, and the musical inspiration seems to draw upon on religious chants of now and then and east and west, yet the artistic purpose that would be the customary point of an album like this is always in the distance. This isn’t, of course, a bad thing as often it is the journey rather than the destination that matters.
An album that needs to be completely absorbed, “Ar Ker” is man and machine shining light into the fog and, if your frame of mind suits such a thing, Seb Brun will take you on a journey to somewhere that is everywhere.
Available from Bandcamp.