‘Sculpted air’ ep from Charles Wesley is made out of vocal samples, digital clips and is aiming at making intimate spaces resonate.
In its 11+ minutes, « Activité Électrique » explores Charles’s voice as a musical potential as much as a plastic material. Processed, high and low pitched, saturated, reverberated in the corners of the stereophonic image, it sounds at times humanly, at others abyssal and abstract. Listeners are confronted to panicking creatures and invited to go through moments of float, along clouds, to gaze at some of them, even the heavier ones, packed with depression.
With only one musical source, Charles manages to create multilayered, crossfading spaces, unraveling uncompromisingly atmospheric dynamics, as much as standstill, rather slow and silent passages.
This piece, unsurprisingly, expresses an interior crisis but, simultaneously, it showcases the euphoric path it is leading to. Dissonant, yet sometimes harmonious, Activité Électrique is about the core of a being actively trying to communicate in the face of fear. Its tactile qualities, its rough edges, and its sonic artefacts are marks of the intimacy unfolding within the digital medium. A space for oneself, triggering rhythmic, emotional loops.
Simplicity, limiting the audio sources, using the material to its boundaries, constraint, are some of Charles’s techniques to reveal beauty from what is there : a vulnerable voice, grasping the spontaneous need to do something out of it.
« Intangible (Sculpted air) » was composed after « Activité Électrique » and is a swarming, techno reinterpretation. Voices weave rhythmical beams, digital dusts appear clear, crack in the ear. The sometimes saturated cries mutate and develop into a pulse, gathering with unspectacular percussions and falling sounds. In the end, after the raffut, a desolated creature flies above, and merges with a luminous loop, a settled horizon.
« Lung Flutter » wraps up the EP with pullulating vocals, a light melody and industrial sounding agitation. Even though ambiguous states and shifts occur during the whole track and it is non-stop on the edge of getting out of tune or focus – with perhaps the most intense sense of wonder on the record – it’s a sweet song, playful, tainted with melancholy, fluttering enchanted tones in the air.
released December 8, 2021
Music, image by Charles Wesley
- Activité Électrique (11:02)
- Intangible (Sculpted Air) (6:10)
- Lung Flutter (5:32)
head to https://tympan.bandcamp.com/album/charles-wesley-sculpted-air to listen to the full EP
Charles Wesley 