First Glances – botpoem and bugyell
This edition of our First Glances series is unique but for the worst of reasons. French ex-pat and current Manchester, UK resident Maxime Lallement is botpoem and half of his experimental sueisfine EP was composed with a “dear friend” who sadly passed away in January 2014.
First and last glances. Celebration and epitaph. Glen Fobister was making music at the time under the name of bugyell, as well as writing a novel. No prizes for guessing its title. With the help of Lallement he planned to release it as a soundtrack-abetted audiobook. The project was never to reach completion. Phoenix-like, Lallement now wants fragments of the soundtrack to live, testament to the enjoyable period in which it was made.
The rousing opening track, “Wake Up”, was, ironically, intended for use in the novel’s final scene in which the main protagonists – a rock band called Orpheus Smashed To Pieces! – are playing their very last gig. It’s an impressive statement driven by a monumental beat, industrial-fired crunches joining urgent strings and atmospheric synth scan for a vibrant collision of electro-noise. Originally written by Fobister and reworked for the sueisfine EP by Lallement, the relaxing ambience of “Write My Name In Water” is then pure reward, running water sampled amidst a barely-there tickling of ivories.
On the flip are two original botpoem compositions. A series of confrontations, “Last Call” pits glitch against piano in a stream of competing tempos, cut-and-paste choral harmonies spliced into a soothing mew. Deceptively simple, “Never Blue”, on the other hand, is an utterly beguiling piece of emotive piano, stripped-back hammers on splendidly isolated strings. To find Nils Frahm reworkings and cult Philip Glass quotes (“Music is a place”) adorning the botpoem Soundcloud page is hardly a surprise at this point.
Sueisfine the novel was tragically never meant to be. What exists of the sueisfine soundtrack manages nevertheless to sing its praises to the heavens, botpoem’s complementary flip the flowers at the funeral.
~The four-track sueisfine cassette will be released March 2nd 2015 in a very limited run on new Manchester cassette label Ramber Records.~