Seul Ensemble – “You and Me Tsunami” (Clandestine Records) [June 23 2021]

Skillfully merging the strangest of bedfellows from DNB to early aughts Madonna samples to arcade music like DJ sets in miniature, this release from France’s Seul Ensemble cultivates an icy-cool ambience with skittering drums and walls of nostalgia.

Opening with a flash of oldschool breaks, a snappy kick, flying in low quadratic bursts, is belied by a gentle, upbeat melody. Together with a fizzy hat sequence, it is all somewhat niveous and whimsical together; almost passing for the kind of Muzak playing in the background of a sit-down Atari driving game, piloting a nonexistent sports car past pixelated palm trees under a 64-bit pink sky. There is a similar bleep-bloop, arcadish quality to tracks like “Never Win,” the warning cutscene music of a final battle, a kind of vengeful finality indicated by frenetic acid and a high-pitched choral hook. The otherworldly nostalgia all this evokes is an important theme on You me and Tsunami which leaves you almost homesick for a place which never existed.

“Guess I’ll Just Die Then” opens with a warped vocal that might presage a particularly moody example of fin-de-cicle Nu-Metal, until you realize that it’s actually a sample of Madonna’s Die Another Day, unrecognizably mutilated into something foreboding and vaguely menacing.

Out of the haunt of vocal and synthetic rubble building up next on the title track, hi hats fire off like warning shots across the prow of a ghost ship, as the reverb cuts and the whorls resolve themselves into swarms of notes. Then, infrequent sneak-attack kicks join the melee, the ghost army slowly gaining force; and before you know it a frenetic DNB rhythm has broken out with the easy, delightful shock of a well-executed flash-mob in a darkening public park. “Kirk” channels a hyperactive Xtal in its shining, intimated overtures; giving way to another cleverly interpolated Madonna sample (this time from “Music”), her chirpy autotuned request to boogie paring with the chilled liquid drum patterning now characteristic of the album like an icy Pinot with the catch of the day. The track moves and dives like a DJ set in miniature, new samples (90’s Hip-Hop, for example) and melodic elements drifting in and out with pleasant caprice.

In the penultimate track, the quiet cultivated by the skittish lowpassed broken beat is destroyed by distortion, like improperly connected wires or the magnificent nuclear hum of the reactor core of a massive video-game weapon. Segments of junglish drum patterning slowly usher in a wonky, Jagwar Ma-esque melody on “They Told me I Could be Anything I Wanted so I’m a Deconstructed Rave Track,” the bassline warbling away like a didgeridoo.

-Winston Mann

Link – Bandcamp

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