Saule

Album review

Who is Saule? In the confines of this album's packaging, listeners are only told that he/she is Belgian. The wordplay of this moniker is interesting: In French, a "saule" is a willow tree, but the word is homophonous to the English word "soul." And Saule's music extends its roots to the history of vinyl records in order to extract soul from the stylus of the turntable. Saule uses three record players, a mixing desk, a microphone, and headphones for feedback. His use of vinyl stays much closer to Philip Jeck or Claus Van Bebber than, say, Christian Marclay or Martin Tétreault. That is, the artist is more interested in ambient textures and the combination of unrelated sounds than by extended techniques and experimentalism. Saule overlays orchestral, electronic, and ambient records, making sure the needle gets stuck in a locked groove. Then it's all a question of gradually fading loops in and out and using enough reverb to blur the demarcations between sources. The idea is not new and the results are less interesting than Jeck or Van Bebber's music. Saule relies on rhythm and pitch to give structure to his pieces, thus eroding the edge of his technique. He lets the patterns repeat too much, moving too slowly. It emphasizes the affected melancholia of his disembodied loops, making the music sound like a predigested version of one of Jeck's Vinyl Coda CDs -- or evoking some of Scanner's friendlier pieces. Looking too hard for soul, Saule only finds rough-grained pathos.
© François Couture /TiVo