Vital Weekly (NL)

Sébastien Roux shouldn’t be unknown by now, for his various releases on 12k and Apestaartje, and Songs is the follow up to Pillow, which wasn’t reviewed in Vital Weekly. The title implies that we are dealing with songs here, and of course there are eight tracks on the CD, which may be songs. But if we take songs literally, as “songs” than Sébastien Roux doesn’t play traditional songs. He plays guitar, and processes that playing through his laptop. Sometimes his guitar sounds like a guitar, but most of the time, it doesn’t. It crackles, hums, sounds like an organ, like chirping insects, or like a spacecraft landing in the ocean. All eight “songs” are collages of sound, sometimes a small portion of it forms what could be song, but sometimes the collage as such seems like a merely random set of sounds. Sometimes they don’t seem to add up to a real song. Although it’s all beautifully produced, soundwise, I have some problems with the overall result. Maybe my expectations are just wrong, based upon the title, but some of the pieces sound a bit too haphazard for me. The real challenge lies, I think in making them into real songs. Next time, perhaps… (FdW)