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Manœuvres d'Automne — Manœuvres d'Automne (AKA Un Peu d'Air!)
(AYAA CDT 0994, 1997, CD)

by Peter Thelen, Published 1996-08-01

Manœuvres d'Automne (AKA Un Peu d'Air!) Cover art

From Switzerland, Manœuvres d'Automne is essentially the project band of Gilles Rieder (Débile Menthol, L'Ensemble Rayé), with help from Laurent Viennet and Serge Baudat. Rieder plays drums, Stick bass, kalimba, metallophones, piano, and various metallic percussion instruments, track depending, plus vocals. Viennet and Baudat cover pretty much the same instruments, with some minor variations – so basically what you have here is three percussionists / bassists. The ten tracks range from noisy song-oriented pieces to more industrial-strength workouts that fall maybe somewhere between Débile Menthol, Mnemonists, and later Shub Niggurath. Jean-Maurice Rossel (ex-DM) offers guitars on two of the tracks, and other guests provide accordion, bass, and sax, where needed. Sometimes the three percussionists find a thrashy driving groove (as on "Aciferville / Thungstene" and "Derisoire Massacre") and at other times create a more free-form sound collage ("Messe Basse" and "Il Pleut!"), though most of the time it's a little of both. Perhaps the most interesting is the title cut, where kalimba, hand drums, and some sort of sampled keyboard sound combine to produce a middle-eastern texture that works surprisingly well. Overall, this is fairly innovative, and there's enough variety here to keep it interesting over the long haul. Fans of Shub, Praxis, and Crimson might well find it worthy of investigation.

Filed under: New releases, Issue 10, 1997 releases

Related artist(s): Gilles Rieder (Manœuvres d'Automne)

 

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