Racine - Amitiés

A Closer Listen

These days, nearly every album is a COVID album, but few have recognized the most basic of positive forces: amitiés (friendships).  Racine‘s album is an expression of distress caused by quarantine and isolation, but it is also a hand reaching for another and being grasped, if not literally then at least figuratively, with the promise to grasp again.

It’s eerie to look back on Quelche Chose Tombe, recorded prior to the pandemic and released on 21 February 2020, only a month before the pandemic hit puberty.  Racine’s themes now seem prophetic.  But if his prophecies of doom and disconnection came true, we can now hope that these prophecies of connection and recovery come true as well.  The church bells of “Trois cent trente-trois lettres imparfaites” can be read either way: ask not for whom the bell tolls or from one bell all the bells toll.

In the old days, when children became ill, they were confined to their rooms, where they were forced to rely on their imaginations for comfort and company.  Sometimes this was done through reading, other times through the outer construction of inner worlds, populated by action figures, plush animals and dolls.  A sheet draped over chairs could become an apartment building, a box a secret room, a plastic tea set an invitation to dine.  The adult version of lockdown is not dissimilar.  Racine searches through his sonic banks for musical snippets, culls conversations from YouTube, and utilizes vocal plug-ins, because he can’t go out to see his friends, and his friends can’t come over to see him.  In Amitiés, he creates his own musical neighborhood.  Fortunately, he can interact with his friends through FaceTime and file exchange; these actual human encounters keep him from going stir crazy, reminding him of the world waiting to be recovered.  Justin Leduc-Frenette and Arigto make appearances early and late, bookending an abstract and agitated affair.  In “Cacouna,” chattering birds make solo appearances, sans musique; the title refers to a province in Quebec, but ironically looks like cocoon.

One of the most unusual tracks is “Ibiza,” in that it is clearly not an Ibiza anthem.  Instead, the piece sounds like Ibiza after a botched job of erasing the people and percussion.  Hints still bleed through the sonic gauze.  Vocal echoes and loops pop up as if taunting the one trying to erase them.  Tempo emerges mid-piece, slows down and speeds up like cycles of recovery and retreat.  The track implies that no current situation can dampen the dual powers of memory and hope.

Throughout Amitiés, Racine strives to retain his humanity while recovering what was lost.  These pieces seem like ghosts of other pieces, because life seems like the ghost of another life.  But every once in a while, a signal breaks through: the violin of “Arête coincée dans une amygdale” surging to the foreground, the chimes of “Grosso” confident and clear.  The overall message: friendships will endure, cocoons will burst, and life will find a way.  (Richard Allen)

The Quietus

It appears that everything is fragmented at the moment. Our means of talking to each other used to be limited to either face-to-face conversations or a home telephone. Now, if you choose, you can be contacted in at least a dozen different ways (phone, email, text, messenger, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, etc., etc.). Then factor in how the last few years have disrupted how people work and interact with each other. Most days I will have face-to-face interactions with three or four people, and one of them is a pre-schooler. On his new album Amitiés (loosely translated as ‘friendship’), the Montréal-based artist Racine tackles this head on. Not only is this, along with isolation of the mind and body, a major theme it’s also how the album sounds.

First track ‘Mon amour je ne guéris jamais’ starts to fragment before us. Field recordings and lopsided synths spring from a croaky harmonium. A disjointed drum pattern emerges. It is huge and echoey, like it was recorded in a disused factory. This gives the album a harsh, industrial feel, yet the gasping sounds seeping from the harmonium give it an organic feel. This is repeated throughout the album and Racine sets up what to expect, while never really showing is hand.

Title track ‘Amitiés’ possesses the nearest thing to a melody on the album. Opening with a stark piano, Racine then layers strings with samples that sound like water sloshing against a dock or someone opening the lid of the piano, a drill breaking up concrete, feedback, fire burning and disjointed vocal sounds. The samples have been manipulated, sounding eroded, in a way that makes identifying their origin almost impossible. All of this combines to create something that is harrowing but also full of humanity.

At times this album brings to mind Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score for the television show Utopia. Both the images and the score were unsettling, almost unpleasant at times, though I found it almost impossible to stop watching. I experienced the same listening to ‘Amitiés’. The urge to skip on to the next track was there, but I couldn’t as I had to know how it ended.

‘Cacouna’ mostly features the sounds of birds cawing. This is after forty seconds of an uncomfortable metallic noise. The sounds of birds bring Amitiés back to reality. So far everything feels like it was created in a sterile environment, but with the birds cawing we are given something to latch on to that grounds it in our reality. It feels weirdly homely. Before ‘Cacouna’ everything was slowly disintegrating before us. Sounds swept around us in a way that it was hard to fathom where they were from or how they connect together and to us. By adding the sounds of the natural world, we are being reminded that everything we hear takes places in the real world and wasn’t construed in a studio.

The album closes with ‘Terme’ which features a glorious, elongated drone. As ‘Terme’ progresses the intensity builds. This ends the album on a reflective, and slightly, meditative note.

At times Amitiés is a hard listen. Parts of it aren’t that enjoyable and, if I’m being honest, I was glad when they had finished. Amitiés doesn’t obey the rules of conventional music. Racine isn’t interested in creating something with hooks or basslines. Instead, he has constructed an album of sounds that reproduce – or that interrupt – the feeling of the time it was created. In this way Amitiés is more of an audio time capsule.

What Amitiés does really well is recreate that feeling of isolation at its worst. Those moments when you are rattling about through your home, and you feel you are the only person left on Earth. The music builds and echoes off itself, then part of it disintegrates before us. Then the song changes. There are swells of strings or explosions of drums and you are reminded that you aren’t alone, and anything is possible. There are other people out there to interact with when you can. And this is really what the album seems to be about. Hope and friendship. A hope that after this you will be able to have those tender moments again with friends. That you’ll be able to contact people out of the blue and arrange an impromptu meet up. It’s been a hard few years, but that will make these moments of interaction with friends even sweeter.

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