Lighthouse Stories

The third album from French electronic music producer Philippe Hallais is markedly different from his first two. His 2014 debut, Garifuna Variations, on Ron Morelli's L.I.E.S. label, was a set of thick, grimy, industrial techno; the next year's follow-up, Sewing Machine, on Parisian label In Paradisum, was a short, sharp shock of out-and-out noise techno even more punishing and percussive than his debut. Lighthouse Stories appeared on the U.K.'s Modern Love, a first for the label, which had never before released anything by an outsider to their tightly knit Manchester scene. This album is somewhat closer in tone to Hallais' earliest singles and sees him going back to his formative influences — grime, backpack hip-hop, ghetto house, and Detroit electro — while incorporating more modern styles like footwork and juke. Inspired by Hallais' teenage memories of hanging out on the beach at night smoking weed with his friends, and the uniquely melancholy diaries of lighthouse keepers (his particular obsession at the time), this record is wholly unique. Fractured and dreamlike, it plays with the listener's expectations, cutting up and mashing together genres in wholly disorienting fashion. Starting with the demolished hip-hop skit "Saab Prelude (Radio)," the album breaks out into the dank, rattling, percussion-heavy "Six in the Morning," and things only get weirder from there on in — the ringing and pitch-bent tones of "Thin Platforms" sound like vintage video game music played on a Tibetan singing bowl and sitar. It's then that the album erupts into an almost brutalizing collision of styles with the fractured, dreamlike "Coquelin Cloarec (Steps)," and its companion piece "Coquelin Cloarec (Emotions)." Each seems to consist of pieces of three or four different songs that have been collaged, with asymmetric, arrhythmic beats, abrupt tempo shifts, and bursts of shifting melody that lurch out of the murk. "Judo Coaster" sounds like a mashup of acid house and jungle, with rave stabs, whistles, and a frantic, skittering beat; the cracking, crumbling "Feigned Confidence," with its buried, soulful house vocal loop, is closer to musique concrète than any contemporary dance music style. The closing "Blinking Lights Sheep" brings things back around to the slow tempos and relative musicality of the album's start with a shuffling hip-hop beat and lush pads that eventually give way to muffled industrial clanking. The album doesn't outstay its welcome, and its relative brevity (just under half-an-hour) plays to its advantage, given the brain-mangling quality of some of the music on display here. The cryptic track titles apparently allude to private jokes the teenage Hallais had with his friends. This is very much an album about nostalgia, about the inefficiency of memory. It's like Hallais took all the music he grew up on and threw it in a blender, and it's great. A lot of people who hear this are going to hate it, and no-one is going to be able to dance to it, but lovers of experimental electronic music will find much to admire. ~ John D. Buchanan, Rovi