L'Ocelle Mare Sans Chemin

For his Shelter Press debut, Thomas Bonvalet assembles plucks, strums, hits and tones made on an arsenal of electric and acoustic instruments and devices, to make theatrical passages of sound that practically float in time. Since his 2006 debut under the L’Ocelle Mare moniker, Bonvalet has attempted to move away from music and focus purely on sound. His tenure playing guitar in various bands - most notably Cheval De Frise and Powerdove - gave him the skill and drive he needed to deconstruct his instrumentation, and ‘Sans Chemin’ is his most successful rendition of this concept. Here, he turns away from musicality entirely, zeroing in on the gestures of performance - plucks, strums and vibrations - using them to construct songs as if they were collages of memories. Each track is named like a gear list. So the minute-long introductory track is titled ‘Flute, Tambourin, Membrane, Piano Ouvert’, and we hear a flute bellowing like a kettle boiling, the scrape of a drum skin, a tambourine rattling and the sustained, multi-harmonic echo of a piano being opened. It’s that simple. Bonvalet doesn’t have a set methodology in hand, particularly, he appears to let the various sounds guide his compositions. Occasionally a track will go by in a flash, like the 46-second-long drone cluster ‘333, 328, 325 Hz’, but sometimes Bonvalet stretches things further. On the almost four-minute ‘Téléphone, Guitare, Interrupteurs, Membrane’, it sounds as if a song could materialize at any second from the rhythmic guitar taps and noisy digital interference, but Bonvalet is careful never to succumb to temptation. Instead, he allows these studies to exist just as they are: joyous celebrations of instrumentation and the vast, varied texture of sound itself. He treats acoustic sources with the same exploratory excitement as an artist like Jan Jelinek treats samples and electronics - there’s an understanding that the result is about sound itself and all the memory, cultural expectation and storytelling that comes along with it.