I like albums that surprise me greatly. They turn all forms of sound expression upside down, gutting them, as if taking the best parts from different genres of music and ultimately creating fascinating works from them. Such is certainly the case with the album hORs TempS by Géraldine Eguiluz and Michel F Côté.

Géraldine Eguiluz is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, vocalist, improviser, poet, and painter. She was born in Mexico, grew up in Bogota, Lisbon, and Paris, and emigrated to Quebec in 2006, where she became part of the improvisational scene. She has collaborated with many artists and projects in various areas of sound. Michel F Côté is a percussionist, improviser, and composer also involved in theater, film, and dance. In 2022, he published the book Danses à venir, written in collaboration with Catherine Lavoie-Marcus, on the art of choreography. He is responsible for various musical projects, including Quatuor Minéraliste, Bruire, and Klaxon Gueule.

The album hORs TempS was created from a collection of compositions by Géraldine Eguiluz, which the artist recorded in Paris in the 1990s. After processing them, she handed them over to Michel F Côté to undergo his deconstruction process. The material is a surreal vision, flickering and surprising from track to track. At times, it sounds like an abstract form from which all magical elements have been extracted. What we have here is an image of filtered and mutated collages combining different musical worlds, destroyed fragments of forgotten songs, avant-garde exotica, ceremonial ethno, noisy retro jazz, electroacoustics, and concrete music dressed in multicolored regions of sonic aberrations.

hORs TempS is a document whose core consists of raw, archaic melodies thrown into transgressive creative processes. Deconstructed, revived, and merged in a kind of mystical ritual of an abstract nature. It is astonishing and fascinating to find the purpose of each of these compositions. They are intriguing and possess an extraordinary soul of creativity. I strongly encourage you to decipher this enigmatic puzzle.