Like Fennesz and Four Tet, Julien Locquet (aka Dorine_Muraille) takes folk-inflected acoustic melodies and scrambles them through his laptop to create digital pastorales. Unlike them, however, Locquet seems to have a conflicted attitude towards the prettiness of his sources.
On Mani, his British debut, he stretches chansons with impressive rigour. Guitar and piano passages are deconstructed in a way that evokes millions of ants shredding a carcass very quickly.
The results are messy, then, but also technically dazzling and often beautiful in spite of Locquet’s frenetic micro-edits.
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He’d benefit from calming down a little, nevertheless.
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