VITIO by Geins't Nait + Scanner + L.Petitgand

This is the second collaboration on Offen by the French post-industrial experimental artist Thierry Mérigout of Geins't Naït, composer and multi-instrumentalist Laurent Petitgand, and the UK composer and sound designer Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), whose prolific catalogue includes scores for dance works by the London Royal Ballet and Merce Cunningham, and who has performed and installed his music in venues ranging from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and a hospital morgue in Garches.

Vitio is a repository of memory: Coastal plateaus and city streets evoked and cracked open by glowering basslines and jumbled rhythms made for ragged walking. Thierry and Laurent have been collaborating together since 1987, the year after Thierry co-founded Geins’t Naït while at the Architecture School of Nancy.

Their work together is dense and textural, influenced by Situationists and Surrealists; the raw loops of Geins’t Naït meeting the musicality of Petitgand, a soundtrack composer for film, dance and theatre who has worked closely with director Wim Wenders. Thierry and Laurent first collaborated with Scanner on OFFEN015, a set of otherworldly collaged slow-mo soundscapes.

Here, on tracks like Vitio and Austral, threads of sampled dialogue interweave with melodic fragments or repeating piano lines, like the sun breaking through above a tangle of golden wrack and rockweed. On Acid and 63, divine industrial shoegaze sweeps across the windscreen like water washed from trees.

Elsewhere, on SIO, submerged clicks surface amid foghorn-like electrostatic charges, an introspective aeromancy. On J’Appartiens, stabs of samples dart back and forth over the ominous time keeping of a sparse beat and pulsing bass. On Sunday and NNSS, we, the invisible listeners, rise to the surface, where there is rain.

Both the sounds of NNSS and the rainfall were installed in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, as captured in a lovely video made by Thierry’s daughter. Beneath the rain, in a building designed by SANAA architects, paving stones can be seen.

Beneath the stones - we can only guess - a cloud.

"Robin Rimbaud brings a certain subtlety to proceedings that distinguishes the album from GN’s earliest industrial works of the late ‘80s, and finds a sweetspot between their feel for textured density and his own sort of weightlessness. One should expect to be teased by a thread from the slow-motion waltz of ‘Vitio’ at the front to the lurking phantasms of ‘J’Appartiens’, via the drizzle-sodden iridescence of ’Sunday’ and flickers of Carpenter-gone-trap efflorescence to ’Sio’, into the deeply creepy, sludgy emulsification of ‘Acid’ and their boggy trip ’63’. They’re all discrete units in the whole, but also found chained in one immersive ‘Vitio (Continuous Mix)’ sequence that best flows on the imagination like run-off from city streets.
Boomkat

Robin Rimbaud - Scanner is an artist and composer working in London. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations and recordings. His work has been presented throughout the United States, South America, Asia, Australia and Europe.

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