Henry Leo Duclos: The Fall of My Church
Audiobulb

A statement accompanying Henry Leo Duclos's The Fall of My Church, that he “works through bringing a collage of sounds together rather than sequencing them,” underacknowledges the degree of form and structure that discernibly emerges during the disc's twenty-five minutes of “crooked mathematics.” Yes, the five pieces do unfold according to an obtuse logic yet their unfolding is hardly ungoverned or arbitrary. Beats skitter, distant voices surface, and noises flutter throughout “and then i saw” while the machines in “shhhh, cover my eyes” come slowly to life in a glitchy manner that suggests Autechre at its most explorative; Duclos's sound likewise suggests kinship with Spezialmaterial's Solarium when squelchy breaks violently pierce dense masses of textured noise in “how long was i sleeping?” and “this is most unfortunate, fate.” The mood throughout The Fall of My Church is often dark, spacious, and fragmented with the material's mutating drift elastically toying with resolution without ever quite surrendering to it.

January 2006