- Surface noise—the tissue-thin crackle that sounds when a needle meets vinyl—was the very thing Belgians Yves De Mey and Peter Van Hoesen sought to avoid with their new label, Archives Intérieures. Instead, they decided to release exclusively on CD. Make what you will of their choice to avoid digital releases, but as vinyl-only labels are ten a penny these days, there's something interesting about their decision to embrace a format as unfashionable as the CD.
The merits of a format are meaningless if the music within isn't good; fortunately, the Frisson EP is very good indeed. Yves De Mey coaxes minimal grooves, which sound like they've been constructed on the fly, from a basic hardware toolkit. He pairs the offbeat drum hits of "Isorrhythmia" with a purring synth line and pads that crescendo into a skewed groove, while on the title track he couples an earworming synth line with a warm dubby bassline.
"Frisson"'s surface is peppered with little accents of noise, but its repeated elements are hypnotic. "Cadence" maintains a nervous intensity throughout, with a propeller-like beat and a sustained chime that retreats and reemerges before erupting into a noisy cacophony. Both Peter Van Hoesen and Miles Whittaker remix "Isorrhythmia." Whittaker piles on the distortion and turns it into a noisy, nightmarish track, while Van Hoesen teases out the depth of its low-end on his echo-laden dub cut.
Tracklist 01. Frisson
02. Empty prints
03. Cadence
04. Phoresis
05. Isorhythmia
06. Isorhythmia (Miles Spring Pressure Remix)
07. Isorhythmia (Peter Van Hoesen Rough Dub)