If the term ‘performance art’ sends a shiver down your spine, then for the love of Gong give Ensemble Pamplemousse a miss.
This diverse bunch of musicians/composers share rich experience in musical academia, and were drawn together by their love for experimental music. …This Is The Uplifting Part is a five-track video album that marries the Ensemble’s wildly unorthodox music to an achingly film school aesthetic. In Child Of Chimera three of them stare out of you, garish colours green-screened behind them, and punctuate a long silence with a snare, then whistles, then wild piano manglings. Add old footage of some poor fella falling hard down a concrete stairwell and spoken instructions on how to fry an egg, what have you got? Who knows! Organic Synthesis Vol.1 is the sound of two Clangers sandpapering each other’s skin off, Guillaume de St. Cloud Suffers A Violent Dazzling is a growing drone of hiss and static, with added lab experiments and pics of the moon. Together Again. Again! sees pianist Dave Broome duet with himself in a MIDI, blip-blop style, as he slowly morphs into Atari-era block graphics. We laud those at music’s outer reaches, but this is all a bit too bloody clever by half.
