Since the invention of the synthesizer, folk music, electronic music and their respective fan bases have had a spotty relationship to say the least. And while there are still VW buses full of hippies who’d love to remind us all that “Drum Machines Have No Soul,” recent crosspollination between the two genres suggests that a growing number of musicians and fans are realizing the sonic limitations of the djimbe.
A prime example of this emerging “folktronic” crossover is Benoit Pioulard, who uses a plethora of samples, 8-bit drum patterns and tape/laptop manipulation to fill the spaces of his otherwise traditionally acoustic folk recordings. The effect of such experimentation resonates as haunting and delicate as anything Paul Simon, Nick Drake or Elliott Smith attempted at the peaks of their careers.
Pioulard (nee Tom Meluch) has been using these methods since he was a teenager, traipsing into the woods of Michigan with a battery-powered tape player to record whatever strange and interesting sounds he happened across. His recently released album, Temper, sees him perfecting this method of utilizing such recordings to create a dense atmosphere of inscrutable ambient sounds and semi-rhythmic loops that surround his voice and guitar like layers of dusty cobwebs.
The tracks on this album, Pioulard’s second, vary from languid, droned-out instrumental passages to straightforward pop songcraft cloaked in layers of percussive static and tastefully applied tape hiss. The warmer moments of Yo La Tengo’s landmark dream-pop album, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, and large swaths of the Magnetic Fields output inform some of Temper‘s more straightforward songs, “Idyll” and “Ahn” being some definite highlights in this vein.
Though he has been a Portlander for about a year now, it was not until late this summer when Meluch announced the release of his second album for the city to take notice. A good reason for this would be the fact that he rarely takes the stage, going so far as to only play a single show at the Holocene in support of the new LP. A cursory listen to any track on the new album quickly answers the question of why he often neglects performing live. Music this densely layered yet delicate is difficult to capture live with a full band, let alone one person.
Most of the tracks from the new album are available for listening online, and are hosted on a variety of sites; some accompanied by videos that mirror the music’s vague pastoral overtones. Much of Pioulard’s work seems more ideally suited for bedroom listening anyway. It’s difficult to imagine his songs maintaining the hazy intimacy of the recorded output in a room full of people in varying states of intoxication.
This is an unfortunate dilemma that manifests itself at most folk shows–the intimacy of the event is too easily shattered by fellow concertgoers. Although this writer remains a staunch advocate for the experience of live music, the primary venue for acoustic music is often in its electronically rendered form, coming through headphones or speakers in the listener’s bedroom.
It would be good of folk “purists” to recognize that they rarely hear their music without electronic interference due to the simple fact that an unamplified voice and guitar rarely make their way past the second row of a venue.
Microphones, amps and the formats of media onto which they can be imprinted all have distinctive characteristics, which artists such as Pioulard can either pretend don’t exist, or use to their full capabilities to craft something unique. This is less technology leaching the meaning from life, than it is technology being utilized in subtly ingenious ways in order to redefine and expand upon the ways life can be interpreted and expressed.