Galerie Stratique is the alter-ego of Quebec based electronic musician Charles-Emile Beullac. Rêves de béton is his fourth album to date, his first coming back in 2001. Beullac is well steeped in the ambient style of electronics, his work reminiscent of Brian Eno or Jean-Michel Jarre. The main CD, Rêves de béton, is a challenging listen, short ideas of song merging ambient and glitch electonics masterfully. The music here is darker and wildly experimental. Sur les galets uses organic percussion to make a clattering, shuffling mess of electronics. Quinze noeuds has an ethereal operatic sample burbling up behind dark electronica and xylophone. Rêve de bitume is a glitchy mess of menacing Germanic electronics. Beullac has also included a disc of previously unreleased material called Archives Vol. 1 as a bonus disk. This material, left off of his previous three albums, along with some bonus material, is a bit more atmospheric than the main album, but just a bit. Ariens sounds deeply influenced by Kraftwerk, dramatic and grand in scale. Scories slowly builds droning electronics into a howling mess. Beullac is making some dramatically expressive music here, and his range is staggering over these two disks.
