The transition from Eko and Skm to iod has apparently been completed as today their first release Eloge de l’usage et de la lenteur by D’incise was announced. D’incise is a collective of musicians from la Suisse Romande, and some may remember their 2006 release on Zymogen, which featured some drum and bass influenced abstractions. Meanwhile D’incise have found out themselves that breakbeat is not exactly the hottest thing in town any longer and finally abandonned antiquated drum loops to have a go at musical abstraction.

In Eloge de l’usage et de la lenteur they try to imitate a digital version of serialism with arbitrary chromatic tones spreading on a broad frequency spectrum: From stomach shaking lows to ear piercing highs at the perception boundery. However, the randomness of events comes at the price of mechanic themes bare of any signs of development. Now experimentation with tone generators and stochastic mathematical techniques can lead to interesting patterns, as the work of Iannis Xenakis demonstrates, however D’incise’s ep does not really fall into this category due to an apparent lack of organised structures, presumably to satisfy the definition of their self imposed “anti-music” tag for their release.

During the course of their release the sound charactaristics see some slight changes that permit a basic differentiation between single tracks which is at least something positive to mention. Persistance for instance experiments with slow down effects that introduce some additional depth to the fragile high frequency dominated anorganic soundscape. Still the track remains stuck in its sterile exhibition aesthetics and Disfonction is the only track that has a little more to offer with its wind-chime culmination points a la Olivier Messiaen and a lesser degree of randomness.

D’incise could be an interesting act and contrary to a great number of net label artists, they also know how to produce themselves decently as the pleasently lean arrangements demonstrate. Unfortunately by playing the “anti-” musician card and practicing their pseudo-serialism they prevent themselves from actually reaching new musical levels and degrade Eloge de l’usage et de la lenteur to a superficial art parody. Which is rather sad considering the potential they seem to have, but I am sure as anti-music performance artists they will be enthusiastically celebrated by uncritical bloggers anyway.