2 out of 5

Label: Un je-ne-sais-quoi

Produced by: Brice Kartmann (mastered by)

Un je-ne-sais-quoi is an experimental label. The translated description for ‘Dictée Magique’ states that it’s a DJ mix of “talking records:” poetry and educational and archival stuff and so on. I’m not new to this outre genre game; I know to set my expectations to ‘anything’ and kinda just let the music work, with the understanding that it might not even be music as we traditionally describe it. But: after a kind of thrilling intro of babbling, warped words, layered over each other, Dictée Magique becomes… fairly bland? I suppose my expecting ‘anything’ was an expectation of sorts; to expect a fair amount of chaos, or activity. The 30-minute sides of this cassette are instead rather static, and, unfortunately, not very mixed to my ears – with apologies to DJ **** and Sainte Rita – meaning that we do get some interesting samples, but there’s only the occasional looping and pitch changing happening, and we’re otherwise (seemingly) hearing things play out in full. I realize there’s likely plenty occurring that my ears are too dumb to pick up on, and that buzzy intro put me into the hopeful mindset of a People Like Us record, and that’s not the project. I think that Dictée Magique is about the discovery of these audio curios, and then they’re being moderately strung together like DJ tracks at a club, so the transition is intentionally somewhat smooth.

The B-side does transition in a positive way to more of a drone state, where samples are played for a significant amount of time, and provided some type of additional sonic layer that equates the material to trancelike mantras. Notably, the A-side is patched together from different recordings; the B-side was apparently one session. Unfortunately, pairing these together makes me assess them as the same project, and it’s harder to get in to the B-side after watching the clock on the A-side, but my tastes would support more explorations of the drone material.

The usual caveat of “know what you’re getting in to” could apply here, as you could love A over B, or love them both equally. For this listener, Dictée Magique falls into the kind of ‘art for art’s sake’ music that doesn’t grab me enough (philosophically or otherwise) to really explore it further.