Alexandre St-Onge

On his 1999 release, Un Mâchoire et Deux Trous, St.-Onge recorded the sound of his skull, captured by sleeping with an old school Mac microphone in his mouth. In the intervening decade, he's flourished in outfits like the Shalabi Effect, Et Sans and Klaxon Gueule, contributing concrete electronics and bass playing. On Entités, he returns to his early solo methodologies of voice recording, but also draws on his ever-developing musical sensibilities to create something compelling despite its broad canvas. The process of transformation is the over-arcing concept, and often that means a deconstruction of instrument and voice in order to recombine them with a strange, new equilibrium. "Amour Aux Yeux Hagards" and "Jaillir" progress more as "songs," with vocal improvisations darting around casual bass and keyboard lines; in the case of "Amour," hinting at a skewed homage to David Lynch's "Mysteries of Love." Entités does veer off in a few too many directions, but it succeeds in finding ground where the outer reaches of experimental music can still be anchored to a human form.