This was one heck of an album to track down the details for, which could have been solved simply by the inclusion of a one-sheet. If there was one it must have gotten lost en-route to me from Chain D.L.K. central, and just about everything about this album and its producers had to be sourced off the Internet. Have you ever tried Googling “Political Ritual”? Just use your imagination as the results you’ll get in this day and age. Fortunately, the artists, Félix-Antoine Morin & Maxime Corbeil-Perron, put their names on the album, but both being French-Canadian, much of the info about them and Political Ritual (the name of the project is also the album title) is in French. According to Morin and Corbeil-Perron, Political Ritual build their music in architectural and woven layers of harmony and polarity, arranging ethereal drone next to hard edged buzz or cinematic movements alongside pummeling beats. With live performance as their backdrop, Félix-Antoine Morin and Maxime Corbeil-Perron took to the studio in 2014 for their first album. Corbeil-Perron is a multidisciplinary artist who has created film and video work and interactive installations shown at international events and festivals, as well as making electro-acoustic and mixed-media music as Le Pélican noir and solo — he also started a PhD at the Université de Montréal in fall 2015. A visual artist as well as an electro-acoustic composer, Morin works solo and collaborates with contemporary choreographers, videographers and several other musicians, finding inspiration for his poetic creations in the processual components of traditional and sacred music. Pushing the boundaries of abstraction, these expert improvisors in analog modular and digital synthesis incorporate invented wind instruments, traditional Balinese percussion, field recordings and digital signal processing into their compositions, intent on shaping a transcendent listening experience.

Okay, that’s all well and good, but what does this album sound like? The album is comprised of two long pieces — Ceremonie (20:07) and Projection cathodique (21:35). While ambient in nature, this isn’t a passive kind of ambient, but a very active, organic and highly charged sort of ambient. Ceremonie is full of crackling electronics and uneasy drones of indeterminate machinery. Over time it morphs into quasi-psychedelic Klaus Schulze territory before veering out into more experimental terrain. The oscillations employed are quite unsettling and throughout its droney demeanor, jarring events occur with some frequency in the background. Just when things seem to be humming along nicely the bottom drops out and the listener is transported to an alien construction site on some God-forsaken planet, replete with the distortion of heavy equipment until it grinds to a sudden halt.

Projection cathodique begins with a less forceful demeanor, the twinkling of crystalline high frequency particles over melodic sonorous low tones and held together with hollowish metallic drone substances. The latter sonority intensifies and echoes off in a feedback loop which morphs in myriad directions overtaking all other sonics present. There is a somewhat natural evolution to the unfolding of this piece that you just have to hear as any description fails to do it justice. Let’s just say it gets pretty dense as sonic layers build on top of each other. By its conclusion there is a return to some of the elements that began this piece and so the cycle is complete.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think a whole lot of the album on the first go-round, but after repeated plays the subtleties were revealed and the brilliance of the work became evident. That it was primarily released as a limited edition vinyl LP (500 copies, also available as a digital download) makes it an even more vital purchase.

Political Ritual, the eponymous release by the Québécois electronic music duo of Maxime Corbeil-Perron and Félix-Antoine Morin, presents itself as a mystery, white print on a grey cover, a series of lighter, vertical oscilloscope intrusions appearing almost possibly accidental. The roles of the two performer / composers — here improvisers — are not distinguished. Each side of the LP presents a piece about twenty minutes in length. Each is almost monolithic, made up of electronic and electronically altered layers.

Specific textures emerge intermittently, through fields of static and waves of droning sound that sometimes move with the inevitability of lava, that flux of molten stone, metal, and ash, or perhaps an oil spill or an approaching tsunami. While the LP itself is free of annotation, there are brief hints in the press release, including a description of the group’s music and the titles of the two sides. Field recordings and instruments come upon by chance enter the fold.

The first side, Cérémonie, is strongly rhythmic, whether the beats are heard as patterns of static or feedback. There are two marked shifts in the work. The first is an extended keyboard improvisation beginning around the seven-minute mark, perhaps “a wedding harmonium bought from an old, hungry man in an Indian village improvises modal lines,” mentioned in the online text. The second is a sudden break and bass-ward glissando at the eighteen-minute mark that suddenly shifts the whole forward movement of the music. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a major event in this context, a wholly new plane.

The second side, Projection_cathodique, begins with chant amidst the static and drones. Its developing rhythms are oscillations, pulses rather than beats. The piece repeatedly cycles towards a crescendo, its materials echoing, the texture thickening; when the patterns change, there’s a sudden turn from tension to repose.

These pieces are genuine experiences — penetrating, insistent, necessary works that fully occupy the time of their realization and hearing. Repeated listening changes them: they literally sound different, richer, more complex, with new elements and relationships emerging, transitions becoming more (and sometimes less) dramatic. Searching this music for answers to what politics and ritual share, only the commonalities of mystery, form, and duration emerge — politics and ritual indistinguishable from one another and from consciousness itself.

Political Ritual est un projet formé des compositeurs montréalais Maxime Corbeil-Perron et Félix-Antoine Morin, deux co-fondateurs de l’étiquette Kohlenstoff Records. Le duo avait publié Oro Axe (2014) sur cette étiquette, une pièce de dix-neuf minutes de musique atmosphérique combinant drone et minimalisme, celle-ci performée en partie de façon improvisée. Ils sont de retour trois ans plus tard avec un premier album éponyme comportant deux nouvelles pièces d’une vingtaine de minutes chacune, en reprenant là où ils nous avaient laissés avec une partie improvisée et une production détaillée qui joue savamment avec le niveau d’abstraction des thèmes musicaux.

Cérémonie ouvre sur plusieurs itérations évoluant à différentes vitesses, créant une atmosphère brumeuse et inquiétante. Le passage s’intensifie, comme un tempo graisseux auquel se colle de la poussière de bruit. On sent un courant électrique servir de lien vers une ligne mélodique d’ordre cinématographique, pas bien loin d’un Blade Runner expérimental. La palette sonore s’éclaircit et se diffuse comme de la fumée d’encens qui remplit lentement la pièce. La mélodie est remplacée par un drone résonant comme un moteur d’avion, texturé ensuite par une itération comme une hélice qui déplace de l’air au ralenti. La résonance des percussions placée vers l’arrière dans le mix assure le déroulement de la scène, bien encadrée par des bruits électriques. La masse sonore se stabilise en prenant progressivement une forme post-rock, qui redouble en intensité avec la guitare électrique toute ne distorsion et réverbérée à point. Ça se termine abruptement en «gros noise sale».

Projection cathodique commence de façon plus aérienne, avec des cordes perdues dans des conduits métalliques, des scintillements dissonants et du «field recording» de ruisseau placé en toile de fond. Le mouvement évolue tranquillement jusqu’à ce que les différentes couches ambiantes deviennent bien denses, s’évaporant à mi-chemin pour amincir la trame, le temps de respirer un peu, et poursuivre dans une forme drone. La masse sonore fait penser à une vièle à roue déconstruite, saturée jusqu’à ce qu’elle redescende dans les basses fréquences pour laisser résonner un dernier vrombissement.

Le premier album de Political Ritual confirme leur combinaison drone/minimaliste, mais au-delà des catégories, ce sont les éléments improvisés qui attirent davantage l’attention. Après plusieurs écoutes, on commence à décoder une partie des effets et traitements et à se rapprocher de la matière première, révélant progressivement le jeu du duo. Le contraste entre l’intention brute et la forme polie entretient très bien le niveau d’abstraction, ça donne envie de chercher une explication à l’expérience auditive, mais on finit par lâcher prise et on monte le volume.

Maxime Corbeil-Perron and Félix-Antoine Morin have released an intriguing new 12” with Ambiances Magnétiques: Political Ritual. The record presents two 20-minute pieces that work more like ‘sound sculptures’ than songs. They take as their subject the detritus of sound, the unwanted buzzes and resonances of technology. On Political Ritual, these sounds move out of the corners and rubbish bins and into plain sight. You are made to confront sound as it really is: caked in surface noise and sonic debris.

Political Ritual is a record of two halves. The first, ‘Cérémonie’, judders like a truck over bumpy terrain. There are moments of what sounds like hyper-engineered studio-production trickery. But in fact, many of these are from acoustic sources, like cellos and organs played in unorthodox styles. There is even the introduction of “a wedding harmonium bought from an old man in an Indian village”.

The unanswered questions left by ‘Cérémonie’ are concluded by the record’s second half: ‘Projection cathodique’. Here, elements of traditional ‘musicality’ creep in, like the bassline that broods over the piece. The ‘politics’ of Political Ritual remain somewhat unclear, but its ambiguity is addictive.