Late Night Review: Aun, Motorsleep
It’s well past two in the morning. This afternoon I had three false starts for reviews that I just couldn’t get moving no matter how many times I wrote a crappy opening paragraph. It happens. Sometimes you have to put it away and go have a glass of orange juice. When I got around to checking out Aun‘s Motorsleep (Alien8 Recordings), it became clear it was music for the quiet hours.
So here I am, enveloped in it again. My eyes are doing that fast blinking thing that you never think looks like you’re falling asleep until you see it happening to someone else, but the drone this one-man band emits is encompassing and chilling and hearing it is like chewing gum to keep yourself awake while you drive. I don’t even know what that means.
Aun is the solo project of Martin Dumais, who is from Montr?al, Quebec. For phonetics’ sake, pronounce that “kay-beck.” It sounds better.
It’s almost post-everything, but Dumais keeps Aun somewhat grounded on the James Plotkin-mastered Motorsleep, letting layers of feedback soundscapes run wild on “Erzot” and “With Bows Bent,” but bordering on minimalism at points of “Tongueless Vigils” and never quite losing control the way one gets the sense Aidan Baker likes to with his solo work. The precise processes that go into making music like this, I couldn’t say, but I imagine it involves a laptop and a lot of guitar pedals. Maybe one of those old, boxy samplers.
Whatever it is, Dumais can make it sweet and welcoming, like on the quiet opening title track, or he can crash it down on you with abrasive ringing vibrations like in the earlier moments of “Unworlds.” I once heard Robert Fripp say at a soundscape performance he was giving that the average person can tolerate no more than 20 minutes of this kind of noise at a time. What Fripp was doing was somewhat less active than Aun. The reason Motorsleep works for its near-hour-long duration is because of the Motor.
The tracks are movements more than songs; Dumais mostly weaves his way out of one and into another seamlessly and Motorsleep becomes a larger piece for its relative lack of definition. As such, it is a monumental work of ambience and atmospheric construction. The underlying feedback of “Neiges” is rough-sounding, but blanketed in the drone placed on top of it, it sounds as though Dumais was hoping the two sounds would suddenly fall into harmony with each other and thus become something bigger than their individual essences. That or the opposite. I’m not sure. It’s very late.
Motorsleep is beautiful at times and cruel at others. The obvious metaphor for any type of music that comes on in waves is the ocean, but rather than crests and caps I see the sky in fast motion, the undulating particles of the aurora and speeding clouds drawing pictures and disappearing while Alfred Tennyson takes notes for later. I see the colors I see when I close my eyes and can still see the light of the computer monitor through my eyelids; neither bright nor dark, but square and malleable into anything I want them to be. Ocean or sky or human. It doesn’t matter.
Five minutes into closer “Then Spring” — immediately following “Neiges” as it would have to — the album’s final segment is announced with resounding tones. Victorious tones. And they come one at a time the way fingers hit individual notes on a church organ, letting go of one at the very moment of hitting the next, a child’s hand playing with the keys. And unlike a darker work, Motorsleep ends on Spring, with life, the album reborn from itself and then finished and quiet. So be it.
