French Sour

To make a French Sour cocktail, you need pastis, apricot brandy, orange and lemon juice, and grenadine. To make this French Sour album, you need Norwegian-based sound artists Sindre Bjerga and Håkon Lie, sound mixer Ask Dørmænen Lie, cover photography and design by EMERGE, and the labels Gold Soundz and attenuation circuit, who are co-releasing the album.

The cocktail metaphor aptly describes the music on this album: There clearly is a great variety of sound sources at work, many of them sounding mechanical rather than electronic, but as in a good cocktail, it’s not the individual tastes taken separately, but the mixture that makes the experience. Bjerga and Lie are shaking as well as stirring their sonic ingredients, using layers of drones as well as rhythmic structures to connect the individual sounds to a whole. While the choice of French Sour as the title may as well remain the artist’s private joke, one could also read it as a shorthand description of the sonic content, if „French“ is taken as an allusion to vintage French musique concrète (a sound characteristic especially striking in track 4, for example), and „sour“ is taken to refer to the certainly not sweet, but rather grating, grinding, abrasive, and machine-like sounds of this album.

File under: experimental, improvisation