2 out of 5

Label: Un je-ne-sais-quoi

Produced by: Antoine Bellanger (recorded and mixed by)

As with Bellanger’s last UJNSQ appearance: this just isn’t quite enough for me. There are some fleeting bops, but I still don’t speak French – making the “interviews about art, dance, creation and love” fall on ununderstanding ears, though the fact that there are interviews on these topics really tickles my ‘this is an art project’ bone, which turns out is really not that ticklish. And I would underline that these aren’t, like, talking heads over ambient or background music – excepting sparse traces of noise which are arguably field recordings… but I’d just classify as stuff unambiguously picked up by the mic – these are straight up folks chattering in unanimated, calm voices about, presumably, the above-mentioned topics.

So we’ve clarified this is very much not my thing, and thus you’ve gotta factor in that bias, however, as hard as I try to push myself into my beret-wearing art project appreciator-self, this still isn’t enough for me. Bellanger really went in for minimalism here (despite an extensive instrument list; a casual listener will mostly pick up drum machines and solitary keys or horns), and unlike ‘Le Jardin Perdu / Talweg’s conceit of cut-and-pasting organic sounds into loops, La flûte is “celebrating” art itself in a manner akin to marveling at the very fact that a pencil can draw a line; that a clumsy sequence of movements can be squinted at as a brilliant dance; or that some plain-faced musical doodles constitute an album.

I’m squeezing this to two stars because I accept that that is an organizing concept – so there is purpose here – and the cassette / packaging itself is an appreciated art piece, but obviously I’m having trouble finding much joy in Bellanger’s concept and purpose here, equally struggling to figure someone as putting this on to listen to outside of the art show they bought it at.