To what extent can noise convey meaning? The question recalls the foundational premise of music: an art-form of the most abstract qualities. Popular music has provided its answer by integrating other mediums: Poetry, literature, film. In the case of BRUIT ≤, noise and political manifesto become one.
Forming in 2016, the Toulouse quartet imbue their post-rock transmissions with revolutionary rhetoric. Visit their Spotify profile and you’ll find a solitary track: ‘Parasite (The Boycott Manifesto)’. A jaded poet’s diatribe against the algorithm, the exploitation of artists via streaming, is scored by chaotic post-rock theatrics. Leaving subtlety at the door, it takes aim at Spotify and Daniel Ek by name, whose hegemonic system has converted the modern music complex into that of “raising chickens on a factory farm.”
BRUIT ≤ understand the extent to which medium and message are intertwined. With their second full-length LP, the quartet are further treading the path of most resistance, boycotting the streaming industry almost entirely. In simultaneity, they’re also challenging a wider social trajectory in which hostile technologies – from AI to algorithms – pervade the modern creative economy.
With the politically-charged Godspeed You! Black Emperor as an obvious reference point, BRUIT ≤ are loading their statements through neo-classical junctures of sound – apocalyptic cymbals, electronics, strings and guitars, combining and clashing to profound effect.
Take, for example, the manner in which glitching synthesisers, sweeping violins, and eerie synth-notes rise and fall into a techno crashout on opening track ‘Ephemeral’. Herein lies a violent dichotomy at the album’s heart: the collision between seamless sounds of machinery, server-rooms, and computer systems, and the visceral, more unpredictable potential of human instrumentation, each side threatening to topple one another.
Like navigating the circuits of a microprocessor, second track ‘Data’ begins with an ambient passage reminiscent of classic Oval, a prominent vocal sample advertising an incoming computer model. The voice, words, message – like an early Boards of Canada sample – echoes the techno-optimism of decades past.
This corporate transmission is soon met with a vicious counterpoint: breakbeat percussion, ethereal synthesisers, and garbled guitar-work, turning utopia into dystopia. Notes and nodes compete to tumultuous effect, ending with a finale in which the previous advert is framed by prophetic irony.
These apocalyptic elements are further explored in ‘Progress Regress’, its forlorn guitars conjuring a comparatively desolate canvas. Met with a patient build up of strings, the composition is complicated, yet again, by a seismic shift. Like hostile settlers contorting a space to their own image, the harmonious prologue shapeshifts from luscious, redeveloping environments, to a concrete fortress of sterile greys and blues.
Like skyscrapers sprouting out of previously fertile land, ‘Techno-Slavery Vandalism’ peers into an apparatus too big to fail. Through sweeping strings and soft synthesiser embellishments, the instrumental build-up takes on a vertiginous quality: like ascending the world’s largest building from an outside view, squinting via dark-tinted windows into spaces of power, bureaucracy, and control.
Through this imagery BRUIT ≤ are not so much worshipping the apparatus, but evaluating the cracks and fractures through which it can become rubble. With familiar persistence, the second half is dominated by harsh guitar tones and a frantic percussive presence like that of a slipping hand catching onto a broken surface, before making way for an ominous silence.
This constitutes, in turn, another narrative concerning corporate hegemony – a rise, fall, and rise again dynamic in which power reproduces itself with immortal persistence – so too, however, does resistance to it.
At 13-minutes long, ‘The Intoxication of Power’ distills these tensions into one explosive finale. Contrasting the previous composition is a regal, almost triumphant assembly of horns that commence the beckoning of a new dawn – faceless suits treading a red carpet to their new throne.
This build-up section combines digital swipes, soft percussion, and baroque embellishments to create an intoxicating portrait of power and its legitimisation. It speaks to the black-pilled spoken-word passage comprising the album’s final moments, in which a voice reads: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.” Borrowed from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the quote applies to models of submission predicated on consumer convenience. Streaming is one such model: faceless and inexpensive for consumers, destructive and disempowering for artists.
Ephemerality is, of course, a powerful sensation by which experiences and memories are constituted, especially in relation to art. There is, however, a stark difference between ephemerality and brevity. With an increasingly congested attention economy comes ephemerality at the expense of feeling; hollow, characterless content masquerading as art – feeding, rather than nourishing – a gluttonous consumer-base.
In transposing these tensions into noise, in making such a brutal listening experience, BRUIT ≤ are directly contesting this attention economy. Ephemerality is not contingent upon duration of time; rather, it is centred around the very concentration of time, the ability to bring time itself to a standstill, as these five tracks artfully demonstrate.
What BRUIT ≤ present is a mode of ephemerality reimbursed with divine qualities – the re-sacralisation of art. What one might consider gatekeeping, or even inaccessibility, by way of boycotting streaming platforms, is rather a much-needed re-connection between artists and their labour.
It’s on us – as audiences, critics, allies – to support the art we love; materially, as well as rhetorically. As the Orwell passage puts it:
“It depends on you.”
The Age of Ephemerality is available to buy through the link below:
