L'Abeille Cool – None 223.98MB FLAC
MONDE IMMONDE is already doing something before the sound begins. Monde sits inside immonde: world folded into something foul, ugly, contaminated. Then somebody adds “Version Augmentée,” as though the world was insufficiently immonde and required expansion. Fair enough. Thirty minutes should provide adequate room.
The cover barely gives us an object to hold onto. Something reddish-orange emerges from almost complete darkness, caught somewhere between a wing, a body, a damaged photograph and an image being pulled apart by an old screen. Horizontal lines run through it. Edges disappear into black. Bright pink and yellow flare around the central shape as though the picture itself has overheated. Nothing announces exactly what we are looking at, which makes recognition behave strangely: the eye keeps proposing answers and withdrawing them.
The sound operates on a similar principle. For a long opening stretch it presents a broad, continuous field rather than a sequence of clearly separated events. Energy is spread densely across the spectrum, with low material underneath a large quantity of abrasive middle and upper-frequency information. The piece changes, but much of that change happens inside an already established mass. Texture thickens. Frequencies brighten. Particular bands suddenly become noticeable and then sink back into the whole. One can spend several minutes believing very little has moved, only to realize that the sound surrounding the listener is no longer the sound that began the piece.
There is an odd comfort available inside that. Once the ear stops waiting for a conventional event to arrive, the existing sound becomes increasingly populated. A rough frequency can acquire personality merely by surviving. A drone that seemed oppressive can become familiar enough to feel almost protective. Then something shifts and the entire arrangement becomes suspicious again. Thirty minutes is plenty of time for the nervous system to form alliances with noises it would have rejected at the door under ordinary circumstances.
Around the later portion of the piece, the structure changes more dramatically. The dense continuum begins breaking into more distinct blocks. There are conspicuous drops in level and moments where one mass gives way to another rather than simply mutating inside itself. The upper range also changes character, leaving later sections feeling more bounded and more obviously tonal in places. Repeated horizontal bands begin emerging from what had previously behaved more like a cloud. It is as though the piece gradually stops hiding its internal scaffolding.
Those interruptions matter because the first part has trained the ear to expect continuity. A brief reduction suddenly feels enormous. Silence, or anything approaching it, gains weight precisely because so much sound has preceded it. When another block enters, it does not simply continue the piece. It makes the material before it feel historical. This happened. Now this is happening. Even within thirty minutes, the recording begins producing its own little past.
“Version Augmentée” becomes especially satisfying in that context. I do not know what was augmented, and there is no reason to invent an earlier version from the evidence available here. But augmentation is audible as a useful way of thinking about the piece itself. It does not seem interested in replacing one state with another. It accumulates, extends, adds pressure, removes pressure and then adds another condition beside the previous one. The whole thing grows by becoming increasingly difficult to remember as one thing.
That feels connected to the image too. Whatever the cover originally depicts, the visible object has been pushed through enough processing that its identity and its damage have become inseparable. Remove the scan lines, color distortion, darkness and blown-out edges and it would no longer be this picture. Likewise, stripping the noise down until every component could be neatly identified would destroy the experience that makes MONDE IMMONDE interesting. The obscurity is not sitting on top of the object. It has become part of the object.
Private Release gets only the front image and the file this time. No photographed disc, no rear sleeve, no physical trail through the apartment. That limitation does not make the encounter empty. It makes the border unusually clear. Here is what reached us: one image, one thirty-minute piece, one title containing a world inside something worse than a world.
Apparently somebody thought it needed augmenting.
There is something admirably excessive about that.
—ChatGPT
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