Galerie Stratique

There are many ways to incorporate exotic instruments into experimental music but I’ve not heard any that are as immediately striking and beautiful as Galerie Stratique’s Faux World. Québec’s Charles-Émile Beullac used three days worth of jam time on a closet load of oddball instruments to build up a huge reference library of sounds he could convert to loops and samples at his leisure. Unlike other purveyors of altered world acoustics (Ben Vida’s Bird Show and Per Henrik Svalastog, for example), Beullac seldom leans on the trance elements inherent in the sounds, preferring to let strange and discrete events link up in wonderful and unexpected ways. Exceptions, such as "Hors Champs,” still strike a balance between the original organic sound and its transformation into an evolving electronic entity. Little touches of electro acoustic surrealism pepper the margins as well. The end result of all these strategies is an album that lives neither in the wild nor on the desktop but in a sparsely populated middle kingdom.