About
Egg hasn’t been around that long. In fact they’ve only been
kicking around the Montréal scene a little over a year. But in that time
Julien Roy and Guillaume Coutu-Dumont have managed to bring together their
diverse musical backgrounds into a project that showcases the subtle humor
and fearless experimentation that have come to represent the highest standard
of creative output coming out of this city.
Their debut album, Don’t Postpone Joy, is a worthy
successor to other local talents made good - the Akufens and the Tim Heckers
- artists who see irony as experimentation, artists who imbue the mechanics
of technological music with a signature smile.
However, unlike Hecker’s treatise to eighties hair metal and
Akufen’s send-up to mainstream radio, this duo’s ideological
contortion act - and one listen will attest to the arch playfulness that
presides over their work - has more in common with cartoonish surrealism than
it does with cultural reflection. These are compositions that make requests
of the imagination.
Equal parts glitch, samples, and playfulness, Don’t Postpone
Joy ably sidesteps the criticisms steeped at the high brow of
experimental electronics through its cultivation of immature sensibilities.
As musicians, Roy and Coutu-Dumont are certainly mature, but their music
doesn’t have to be.
Whereas Roy and Coutu-Dumont both have a steep background in
Montréal’s electroacoustic community, Coutu-Dumont’s work as a
percussionist has also led him into the city’s contemporary
experimental jazz scene. As a result, their compositions reflect the
refractions of wide array of musical tangents, from the spaghetti-westernized
soundtrack work of an Ennio Morricone to the deviant improvisational
techniques of the 1970’s Eastern-European avant-garde jazz contingency
to barely recognizable nods to flamenco and traditional French pop, all
enveloped in a shell resilient with Berlin’s minimal techno
swagger.
To bring all these elements together on one album is a statement in its
own right, to do it on an unabashedly electronic album raises the bar another
notch, and to pull it off this concisely on a debut is an act worthy of our
attention. For this reason, the people behind the world-renowned Mutek
festival have chosen Egg as the inaugural act for their new label,
Mutek_Rec.
Apart from touring with the Mutek organization to Mexico and Chile, they
duo will be hitting the road on their own as well. Given the
performance-based approach both Roy and Coutu-Dumont often take with their
solo projects, you can expect to see some very interesting live presentations
of Egg in the upcoming months.
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