Marie De la Nuit - Transportées (Permanent Draft)

 

Album Review: Transportées by Marie de la Nuit, released February 21, 2025, via Permanent Draft (label co-founded by poet and author Fanny Chiarello and drummer and percussionist Valentina Magaletti).

With Transportées, Marie de la Nuit (French sound artist Marie Guérin) hand over a compelling excursion into the porous boundaries between sound art and acoustic ethnography. Known for her deft manipulation of field recordings and radio archives, Guérin has long explored the spectral residues of broadcast media, tracing the narratives embedded in its sonic detritus. This latest work marks a significant evolution in her practice, assembling a dense and evocative tapestry that folds the traditional into the experimental, the familiar into the uncanny. It’s a listening experience that resists categorisation, inviting the audience to inhabit a space where memory, place and transmission converge.

At the heart of Transportées lies a K7 tape, a deeply personal object containing an endangered repertoire, passed down from mother to son. The tape serves as both a physical and metaphorical conduit for the transmission of oral traditions, capturing and preserving, yet fleeting. This piece of history serves as the starting point for Guérin’s exploration of sound, which spans a sonic path from Brittany to Tunisia, weaving together oral histories, archival recordings, and electronic manipulation. The album is a cross-cultural journey through time, space, and memory, blending the familiar energy of folk traditions with the experimental language of modern electroacoustics.

The album’s opening track, "Bdira" (00:41), immediately sets the tone, enigmatic and brief; it offers little in terms of traditional structure, focusing instead on an elusive sound that feels like a fleeting ghost of a memory, captured in time. This brief introduction is followed by "Le Bled" (03:47), which builds on this tension, introducing a melodic fragment enveloped in noise and reverb, as if the sound is being reclaimed from an old, worn-out tape. "Le Bled, La Suite" (06:09) further expands on this concept, its longer runtime allowing the sounds to unfold in more layered, expansive forms.

However, it is "Mon Fantome" (06:08) where Transportées truly begins to reveal its emotional depth. Here, Guérin strikes a balance between abstraction and narrative, using field recordings and treated voices to conjure a sense of spectral presence. There’s a haunting beauty in the way her compositions evoke both the fragility of memory and the enduring strength of oral culture, all while remaining firmly grounded in the avant-garde traditions of electroacoustic music.

Tracks like "BZH" (03:13) and "Rembombardes" (03:15) provide moments of rhythmic clarity amidst the more abstract compositions. These pieces allow for a glimpse of structure, with "BZH" conjuring the folk sounds of Brittany, while "Rembombardes" introduces a more playful, almost hypnotic quality to the mix. Both tracks serve as counterpoints to the album’s more elusive moments, helping to anchor the listener within the broader narrative of Transportées.

The centrepiece of the album, "Le Refrain" (16:50), is a sprawling, almost cinematic piece that brings together the various sonic threads introduced earlier in the album. Here, Guérin’s work reaches its fullest expression, as field recordings, archival voices, and electronic treatments merge in a hypnotic trance-like flow. The track’s length allows for a deep exploration of texture and atmosphere, drawing the listener into a meditative state that feels as if it could last forever.

The closing track, "La Mandaniya by Bdira" (01:00), brings Transportées to a delicate conclusion, echoing the album’s opening but with a sense of closure and reflection. The fleeting nature of the piece mirrors the transient nature of memory and tradition itself.

Masterfully composed, mixed, and mastered by Elisa Grenet, Transportées is an album that feels both intensely personal and deeply universal. It’s an album that refuses to settle into one genre or style, instead drawing from a wide range of influences and techniques to create something that is, in essence, a living document, a conversation between the past and the present, between cultures and technologies.

For those willing to engage with its complex layers and subtle textures, Transportées offers a richly rewarding experience. It is an album that invites the listener to reflect on the impermanence of sound, the preservation of culture, and the power of the archive, all while forging new paths in the realm of electroacoustic music. It is an ambitious, thought-provoking work from one of the most innovative sound artists working today.

Rating: 9/10

Transportées is a daring and immersive release that confidently expands the parameters of experimental and electroacoustic music. Its sonic architecture is both intricate and uncompromising, inviting listeners into a world where convention is deliberately unsettled. While its more abstract passages may prove demanding for some, the album rewards attentive listening with moments of striking clarity and emotional resonance. In a year marked by innovation across the genre, Transportées stands out as a work of considerable ambition and artistic depth.