Following 2019’s L’impatience directe des corps CD on Glistening Examples, Stay Still is the newest release from French poet and sound artist Erell Latimier. The LP comprises two extended pieces commissioned and composed within the last few years that continue her exploration of the web of connections between voice and sound. She’s far from the first to embark on this voyage—see last month’s review of Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt—but both “Ils seront silencieux après” and the title track display a more focused and singular trajectory than her previous work. The former is a spellbinding drama of both text and texture, making use of jarring junctures between lulling concrète vignettes and unaccompanied speech to imbue the narrative with a haunting dislocation. The spoken delivery of the tale of a profoundly removed woman (many thanks to the artist herself for providing a translation so I could follow along with the French) is at once forlorn and detached, as if the speaker is grasping onto these memories one last time before letting them go forever. It turns out that this process is audible too: the sentences begin to echo, then fracture as they’re laden with distortion and tape slur, before finally dissolving into a fraught harmonic coda. Latimier spotlights the spaces where distinctions are difficult. “Ils seront” ends with a dry bubbling noise that could be the rattling of undecided vocal cords, while “Stay Still” enlists a cast of guest speakers—Camille Belhoradsky, Eric Cordier, and Will Guthrie—to stitch a rotting lattice of half-formed phrases and abandoned thoughts. The artist’s own words are once again the unifying element, here doomed to be vivisected into jagged glitches. There’s a moment around the 13-minute mark, so fleeting you’ll miss it if you’re not listening closely, when a rare wail of raw emotion cuts through the murk and is immediately, mercilessly silenced. How horrific it is to break… or rather, to be broken, because there is indeed someone else here: “They noticed it and came to watch us. They stocked us in a large room and kept telling us: don’t move, don’t move—and after, louder, stay still.”
Review: Erell Latimier – Stay Still (Kythibong, Nov 18)
Following 2019’s L’impatience directe des corps CD on Glistening Examples, Stay Still is the newest release from French poet and sound artist Erell Latimier. The LP comprises two extended pieces commissioned and composed within the last few years that continue her exploration of the web of connections between voice and sound. She’s far from the first to embark on this voyage—see last month’s review of Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt—but both “Ils seront silencieux après” and the title track display a more focused and singular trajectory than her previous work. The former is a spellbinding drama of both text and texture, making use of jarring junctures between lulling concrète vignettes and unaccompanied speech to imbue the narrative with a haunting dislocation. The spoken delivery of the tale of a profoundly removed woman (many thanks to the artist herself for providing a translation so I could follow along with the French) is at once forlorn and detached, as if the speaker is grasping onto these memories one last time before letting them go forever. It turns out that this process is audible too: the sentences begin to echo, then fracture as they’re laden with distortion and tape slur, before finally dissolving into a fraught harmonic coda. Latimier spotlights the spaces where distinctions are difficult. “Ils seront” ends with a dry bubbling noise that could be the rattling of undecided vocal cords, while “Stay Still” enlists a cast of guest speakers—Camille Belhoradsky, Eric Cordier, and Will Guthrie—to stitch a rotting lattice of half-formed phrases and abandoned thoughts. The artist’s own words are once again the unifying element, here doomed to be vivisected into jagged glitches. There’s a moment around the 13-minute mark, so fleeting you’ll miss it if you’re not listening closely, when a rare wail of raw emotion cuts through the murk and is immediately, mercilessly silenced. How horrific it is to break… or rather, to be broken, because there is indeed someone else here: “They noticed it and came to watch us. They stocked us in a large room and kept telling us: don’t move, don’t move—and after, louder, stay still.”
Noise Not Music 