The Bell Orchestre was born in an old dance studio in central Montreal. As dancers ran, froze and crashed into each other and footsteps echoed in our ears the music began to create itself, painting landscapes and underscoring bodies, communicating through powerful, wordless gestures? The band spent two years among the dancers, and when the time came to fly away, the music continued to evolve and exude intangible, physical qualities. Bell Orchestre impacts the body and the emotions, evoking images, vast open spaces, movement and conflict, while retaining in the music a delicate intimacy and a raw ferocity that is completely unique. It taps into the acoustic delicacy of chamber music, the urgency and volume of post punk and rock, and the intricacy of contemporary electronic music. Often drawing comparisons to film music, perhaps this band is not so much creating the soundtracks to movies, but rather inventing a musical meeting place for a century?s worth of city ghosts, weather patterns and shifting architecture. The Bell Orchestre is made of strings, bells, horns, drums, stethoscopes, samples and quiet noise. Their live performances soothe, excite and soar.
Bell Orchestre
Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light
[Rough Trade; 2005]
Rating: 7.8
Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light is everything instrumental post-rock should be and nothing it shouldn't: it sounds live but hardly loud and is brimming with sound but uncrowded. Renouncing formulaic bombast, Bell Orchestre dazzles by finesse, not force. Call it blank slate music-- oceans of negative space awaiting colonization-by-imagination.
Bell Orchestre, led by the Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry, sparks memories of critically maligned early-decade instrumentalists Ghosts & Vodka and Telegraph Melts-- bands derided, in part, for their lack of distortion. Bell Orchestre is more frictional than the former, less NPR-arty than the latter, but its general drift is similar. From the stertorous, semi-electronic horn swells of prelude "Recording a Tunnel (the Horns Play Underneath the Canal)", the album worms into focus. Less like rain than a slowly gathering fog, "Les Lumieres Pt. 1" builds from a murmur to a klaxon. To follow its development is to watch bacteria conquer a petri dish: New threads twist off somewhat chaotically from the brass nucleus-- an awakening string trill here, a gingerly bell flourish there.
On "Les Lumieres Pt. 2" the ecosystem hits full flower. Sultry, echoing horns chafe against skittish strings and fast, charging beats, a textural contrast reminiscent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. (The bands, as Recording demonstrates, also share a penchant for ungainly titling.) But Bell Orchestre are on a much happier tip. Where Godspeed ride an abandoned train through a miserable wasteland, Bell Orchestre gallops across rich, rustic landscapes. Like Lumen or Explosions in the Sky, it's all a bit fantastical, but the band goes easy on the symbolistic dalliances. Bell Orchestre is all about freeing our neural pathways, not directing them.
And hey, here's an idea: concision. Five of Recording's 11 tracks undershoot four minutes. Despite a couple of longer, jammier pieces the album is a still a breezy listen. That's because, unlike lost siblings Do Make Say Think, Bell Orchestre largely avoids ambient pussyfooting. Voluminosity and slenderness rarely cohabitate in instrumental post-rock, but here both are integral. Nuggets "Recording a Tunnel" and the chilly "The Bells Play the Band", which imagines Boards of Canada piped through ham radio, would become boundless gorges of nothingness in the hands of many similar bands; Bell Orchestre wisely consigns its most shapeless passages to short stopgaps and segues. Meanwhile, instrumentally verbose songs like "Throw It on a Fire" are kept asteer by bedrock percussion.
Recording is designed to underwhelm. It rewards repeat listens and nurtures those lulled by its intoxicating spumes. Whether the album achieves its titular synesthesia is debatable, but Bell Orchestre tap into a wide, mesmerizing range of the spectrum.
-Sam Ubl, August 25, 2005
Review by James Christopher Monger
Festooned with stickers announcing, "featuring members of the Arcade Fire," the debut from Canadian post-rock instrumentalists the Bell Orchestre owes as much allegiance to Tortoise, Jim O'Rourke, and Brian Eno as it does the lost childhood anthems that populate Funeral. That said, there's no harm in stealing a little buzz from a group that has recently found itself sharing the stage with, as well as being covered by, legends like U2 and David Bowie. Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light borrows enough Philip Glass repetition and John Cage minimalism to warrant its Orchestre title, but it's first and foremost a rock record. While it slows to a nearly forgettable pace about three quarters of the way in, standout tracks like "Lumieres, Pt. 1" and "Pt. 2," "Throw It on a Fire," and "Salvatore Amato" are soulful windows into the hearts of classical players who spent much of their time in school harboring dreams of decrepit rock clubs and buzzing amplifiers. They're young enough to veer off into any direction, but old enough keep their wits about them, resulting in a debut that sounds a lot like New York urbanites the Rachel's and the Clogs, but a little more dangerous.
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