PLEQ – Good Night

Basses Frequences

About 20 minutes of mostly well-made minimalist ambient, four re-workings of an idea by Polish Bartosz Dziadosz whose foremost version has not been heard here; thus we’re left to judge what other people prepared. The opening track is perhaps my darling in its economical unfussiness, Glitch’s respect of a repetitive pattern infused by nocturnal melancholy and tinged with a recurrent piano note informing the set’s most purposeful episode. Pjusk’s introduction of a melodic factor – explicated through a (sampled?) fuzzy guitar – is not helpful in maintaining the initial atmosphere’s magic, background fluorescence notwithstanding. Offthesky opens things up towards galactic abstraction at the beginning, before restating the identification with the original in the second half of his rendition, with the piano fragment in evidence and electronic reverberations a little more stretched than elsewhere (though scarred by distant distortions at the end). Philippe Lamy closes the whole with a measure of harmonic dissonance, in turn generating suspended clusters under which the essential structure is almost disintegrated at times, to reappear remodelled and expanded moments later. A distinct insecurity chosen as conclusive option, a “Good Night” of bad presages erasing the sweet dreams. This and the first are the piece’s best translations.