aaamusic | On 30, Jun 2015

Xavier Thomas, otherwise known as Débruit, is, in a sense, a creator of worlds. His medium of choice for this humble activity is electronic music and all of the inspiration and direction for the atmosphere comes from the flavour, inhabitants, views and very being of the imagined worlds he seeks to realise. In this latest release, Outside The Line, Débruit presents to the listener ‘African Coldwave’, a genre born from mixing the pasts of West-African and 80’s New York music scenes.

The balance between the two worlds weaved into this new reality is excellent. It even becomes a slight challenge to determine which parent land a given idea more naturally belongs to at times, despite how far removed the parent worlds may seem to be. When contemplating the level of success he’s had in creating a new land, I started wondering whether or not, from just hearing the music without any knowledge of Débruit’s intentions, could we conceive of a similar world that he had?

I’d answer this with a big ‘YES’, at least assuming one has a working musical knowledge of both territories that influence this. Of course, it’s impossible to perfectly represent a scene from a specific time and place in one album, but Xavier is using these influences to create an entirely new world, not recreate already existing ones. He achieves transcendence of reality by bringing prime elements of respective styles into defining every movement, motif and cadence while combining ideas born from their respective musical climates with a slightly avant-garde and almost psychedelic manner so that they still sound unplaceable.

This foreign groove party begins with a monologue over a shivering white noise in ‘Drift‘; we hear some of the only words spoken on the album painting the image of a character washing up on the shore of this weird land. This eases well into ‘Separated Together‘, puffed with a cordiality in the melodies of electric dial tones, the warmth of which is followed in the sampled vocals. These vocal calls start to paint their own more specific story to be placed within the fictional world, which can ultimately be decided by the listener, if decided at all.

In ‘Stand Up‘, the dry sound of synthetic melody rolls up and down while being slowly overtaken by a metronomic bass, which itself becomes delighted and decorated by a quick, jittering tom-tom sound popping excitedly in between and around the gaps in a quasi-sporadic manner. On numerous other tracks on this LP, the delay slipping out of every sound works in tandem with these opposing yet perfectly suited influences to further push the unreal, psychedelic vibe that the album ultimately brings across.

There are even two aspects to the percussion across this album. Some straight, driving four on the floor beats often come to flesh out the atmospheres expected of NY electronic dance music but often contrasting this is are loose, clunkier rhythms and poly-rhythms of African tribal styles. A lot of the synthetic sounds on the album also showcase a similar duality to this. The final product brings an innate questioning of reality and perception in music, and calls our own conscious ways of perceiving and evaluating the music we hear in order to reconsider the meaning, origin and intentions of a sound and it’s ties to a culture and/or place.

Craig Doporto