It’s not often that I have to refer to a press release to decipher the context and execution of all that I was hearing yet I had to do just that with “Ambo” by Frise Lumière. Of course, referring to the press release wasn’t actually of much use.
Frise Lumière – the stage name for Ludovic Gerst – is a one man and his bass artistic adventure and, through a variety of percussive and no doubt entirely analogue techniques, he transforms his instrument into a device that can extend his wordless extemporisations over the duration of an entire album. Did that therefore mean that “Ambo” is so esoteric that even my usually inscrutable ears could not make sense of it? Not really for it was just that the whole structure of this album appeared somewhat conventional yet I was nonetheless driven to wonder if all this was inspired more by eastern musical constructs than western ones. You might perhaps think that this would align the music on this album with the world of, distinctly exotic, soundtrack cues yet, in my world music obsessed mind, the echoes of the traditional music of Japan complete with the ghost of the koto and shamisen had duly haunted all his chords as if to sonically fold the world of the modern avant-garde into the past of a distant culture.
No doubt the esoteric nature of Frise Lumière’s music will exclude the mainstream and will instead excite the arthouse aficionados into a high bitrate frenzy of deciphering those sounds into their true meaning. And why not?