From Canada hails Galerie Stratique, also known as Charles-Emile Beullac, and this is fourth release, in fifteen years. He calls himself a sound hunter and his music is all about applying concrete sounds to electronics, and perhaps vice versa. There is a small booklet inside ‘Dreams of Concrete’, as the title translates, in which he explains his influences, a list of stuff (which includes gongs, clay bells, metal bowls filled with some water, but also a Commodore 64, drum machines, effect pedals and roll paper towels. To Galerie Stratique everything is music. There are twenty-one pieces on the first CD, which is the main thing in this package. On the other disc, ‘Archives Volume 1’, there is a bunch of ambient lullabies from his earlier days, that weren’t good enough for his previous releases, but now, polished and refined, are. What I like about the first disc is the simply approach Galerie Stratique has going per piece. Twenty-one songs in forty minutes that equals, say, two minutes average per track. That makes that all of this is short and to the point.
A few bangs here and there, feeding them through a modular set-up and play around with these sparse elements for two minutes is sometimes really enough. To be concise is not easy, but Galerie Stratique does things very well. Each piece is made with quite some imagination, and also the variation is well considered on this album. An excellent mixture of electronic tunes, melodic, witty at times, and a majority of more abstract pieces, that quirky, sad, uplifting, alien and sometimes tedious. With such a variety that is likely to happen.
The bonus disc contains also forty-one minutes, but then ten pieces, so here all is a bit longer and we are promised more ambient like music. That’s what we get indeed. Lots of synthesizers, a bit of drum machines and it seems there is a lot less of electronic processing of acoustic sound material. There is a more minimal approach towards composition here, with synth washes being an obvious connection, but it’s not exclusively like that. Galerie Stratique also plays out some harshertones and tunes such as in the fifth piece (no titles for the pieces on this bonus disc). When he employs a rhythm, I must say I am a little less interested, but luckily those tracks are kept to a minimum. In general this is all a bit different than the first CD, and even while there is a bit of variation in these pieces, I am also inclined to think it’s perhaps a bit superfluous, but surely fans would disagree with me.
