Jean-Francois Laporte - "Soundmatters"

It's hard to talk about an album like this without smelling of pretension. Beholding a series of sound pieces that are as physical and minimal as these leaves words looking suspicious and unnecessary. But this album is just so cathartic. You must hear it.

Jean-Francois Laporte is a French-Canadian. What does that have to do with anything? Not much, except that it helps me bone up on my French while I peruse liner notes. This man works with drones, but not like a lot of these artists who use computers. All of Laporte's source material is live instrumentation or "machine coaxing," like on the epic 26-minute "Mantra" which is a recording of this man miking an air compressor on an ice rink and subtly altering valves and piping or placing metal discs over vents to create these sick-ass timbres. And just to make sure it's not as easy as putting a microphone next to your lawnmower, this guy did over 200 takes just to get it right.

The result is divine, really. So relaxing. You know how sometimes you notice that your fridge is actually singing, and has been all its life? Sometimes it gets on your nerves, but what if you put that refrigerator in a cavernous space like an ice rink? It could sound pretty good. Laporte suggests that the machines of our post-industrial era create constant mantras that surround us, and when listened to in a revised perspective they can actually achieve transformative and meditative properties.

Jean-Francois doesn't merely play the prepared air compressor, no. The first track on this album is all wind recordings from an ice storm in Montreal. The second is really pretty, in that post-industrialization way. The third track "Dans Le Ventre Du Dragon" has him using a self-made instrument that has a series of car alarms and trumpet bells all controlled with foot pedals (that are attached to the bits that do the blowing). The idea is that one can blow a horn for an indeterminate amount of time and really let it ring out. To demonstrate how awesome this can sound, Laporte recorded this track in the hull of an abandoned ocean tanker. Where does one book an empty ocean liner to record? Dude's got connections. I actually used this track in a film to accentuate the awesome mass of the Giant Sand Dunes in Colorado. The echoes and rich, bellowing tones are just awesome to listen to.

The album takes pieces recorded between 1997 and 2005, all of which seemed to have won "prizes" at different music conventions around the world. I guess that means this music is "serious music." When you create a foot pedal horn entourage machine and can win worldly competitions, you are definitely serious. The album is beyond all of this talk talk. It is entirely meditative. I just listened to it in my living room at a good volume and I was totally into it. I sometimes imagine someone breaking into my house, only to enter and hear magnificent sounds such as these, thus confusing him long enough to club him in the head with my crowbar.

Jean-Francoise Laporte's music can help you nab burglars. That's what I'm saying. If you're curious what other "serious music" sounds like. Check out the label this album is on: 23five. Among the other artists are Francisco Lopez, Coelacanth and Steve Roden. There's a ton more you've never heard of, doing things no one has thought of. Pretty fascinating and Nerd-O-rama.