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Tarek Atoui, "Mort Aux Vaches"
Tarek Atoui is a young Lebanese-born musician who went to study at the French National Conservatoire in Rheims in 1998. He now seemingly divides his time between France, Lebanon, the Middle East, and Amsterdam (where he is the co-artistic director of the Steims studio), performing and giving workshops. His Mort Aux Vaches release is composed of breakbeat-anchored cut-ups, samples, sound collages, noise, and unabashed experimentalism.
In the same way that breakbeat deconstructed dance music and took it to one of its many possible logical conclusions, so Atoui is himself appearing to indulge in some naked deconstruction. In fact, I could posit that here is a double deconstruction, taking apart not only breakbeat itself but also doing the same to the world and society around us. Atoui, literally and metaphorically, attacks it, cuts it up, dissects it, and eventually stitches it all back together in Frankensteinian manner. What results is an abstract sound-painting, composed of many disparate elements drawn together and sewn into a cohesive whole. What’s more, despite its stop-start nature, I found myself quite enjoying its anarchic mix of textures and atmospheres.
Admittedly, it is hard to relate to this on anything other than an intellectual level. Understandably then, combining as it does numerous samples and ideas from all over the place, intellectually the overall themes upon which this seems to be hung, at least for me, are decay and entropy. The idea that inevitably all matter tends towards chaos is a particular aesthetic subtext on this collection of six untitled tracks, and it can be applied on both the macro, galactic level and the micro, social one. My reading of Atoui’s music is that it is a narrative of, and a commentary on, the way things break down and the ongoing processes of disintegration. This is especially pointed in these days of the manifest global village, where cultural identities become diluted and merge into a bland universal homogeneity. By collating all the sound sources that he does, from some hipster lazily intoning the word ‘yeah’ on track two to the caterwauling screech of a singing Japanese lady (just for random examples), one can embrace the totality of modern culture and its gradual devolution within the duration of this album. Moreover, by firmly underpinning all with the scattershot rhythm breaks and barrages, it hauls the whole shebang right up to date, underlining perhaps the urgency of our current global crises.
A phrase kept recurring to me while I was listening to this; collapsing buildings. Or perhaps collapsing edifices would be a more appropriate epithet. Sounds collapse in on themselves, shatter, split apart, collide, concatenate, and reform in constant chaotic motion. Order tries to assert itself in the midst of all this cacophony, managing to poke its head through here and there; and so do quieter moments. Inevitably though perhaps, it’s doomed to failure against the rising and strengthening tide of entropic forces. The pained screaming on the last track, set against a sweeping backdrop of choir-like voices, seems to point to the fated end; despair, anguish, pain, and destruction.
There is no doubt in my mind about the direction that Atoui’s music takes on this album, and what it portends. For me, it locks on to the end-of-times angst that seems to grip modern society, portraying with alarming clarity the not-so-gentle collapse of global civilization with its attendant anarchic aftermath. Inevitably this is a subjective personal interpretation; however, the vibe I get from this production makes me feel that maybe I am not that far off the mark.
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