Vital Weekly – Eskifjörður
Vital Weekly, 2014

Only twenty-five is Thibault Jehanne, but he has made some installation pieces and film soundtracks and one of these is now released: « Eskifjörður, is an Icelandic town settled along the East fjords, still between two lively environments », I read on the website and it is a film without images (if I understood this well). Jehanne is a field recordist but one that may add a few tricks, such as sound manipulation, collage techniques and such like. The sounds are all from Iceland’s more rough natural landscapes, and water bursts and burps around here. It’s hard to tell if Jehanne uses any electronics or not, but in ‘Le Naufrage’ it seems so; that, or he uses so many field recordings together that it gathers this heavy drone like sound, like a cluster of organ tones being played. I am reminded here of some of the early The Hafler Trio (circa ‘Brain Song’) here, but throughout the use of the field recordings prevails here, it seems, and Jehanne puts them together in a very clever way. It’s music that is full of tension and attention for the details and by using collage like tech- niques he builds some excellent music, with a fine ear for subtle changes and rapid change-overs. It’s especially that mixture between the pure field recordings, the rumble of nature as it were, which works well in combination with those thicker washes of sound – either the pure untreated sounds but then heavily layered together or via some kind of electronic manipulation. Whatever it is, it’s not really important to know this. What counts is that this is a more than excellent release. A great new discovery in the area of field recorders with a strong voice of it’s own.