Hervé Perez is both an audio artist and a visual artist but the sound art he makes tend to get deeply seared into your consciousness as provocative visual art would. PLGD is the last set of sonorities he’s created using is sax, his voice, electronic effects and Tibetan meditation bowls. The art is how all this disparate sources for sound converge to create an alien but liquid whole.
If you’re looking for harmony, melody or rhythm, this isn’t the place to look. Perez is going for something much more primal than that in the creation of these sound sculptures. Similar to the mission of conventional music though, it uses vibration to give your brain something striking and unfamiliar to process and ponder.
Processed field recordings seems to form the basis for PLGD’s opening salvo “Styfg,” where the sounds of nature are completely blended with otherworldly buzz. We hear Perez’s soprano saxophone for the first time on “Likabrd Inacag” but here it becomes the basis of an overall sonic painting made up of heavy processed sounds of that sax. “Winds of Many Harms” is the sound of flowing air, whether that’s through a heavily altered sax or by other means.
Those meditation bowls hums and chimes on “Lance L’eau Du Lac” are ancient timbres that never sound stale, and if you never heard these resonant instruments from the Himalayas, you’re in for a treat.
Perez take his sax to new, exotic places on “Winds and Humming Buds,” at times making his horn resemble a flute. For “Par Anneaux,” he dubs over his sax several times to make it resemble a flock of geese that over time gets enmeshed into a larger tapestry of dreary sonorities. The sax becomes a percussion instrument during much of “Il Faudrait Qu’on Cesse,” spraying into the void a barrage of false notes.
“Bird in a Bush” uses silence as another instrument, occasionally interrupted by rustling, the bowls, percussive knocks and a barely-perceptible low hum. “Styfg Coda” roughly approximates the distorted sound of storm waves crashing onshore and “Soprano Fields” transits from near-silence to ghoulish to placid.
Hervé Perez makes musique concrète using atypical sources while audaciously pushing his soprano saxophone into uncharted territory. That’s why PLGD is made for ears thirsty for entirely new sounds, even for those ears who think they’ve heard it all.
PLGD is now available from Pan Y Rosas Discos. Pick it up here.
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