Pleq: Good Night
Basses Frequences

Pleq (Bartosz Dziadosz) would seem to be flirting with Bvdub's chosen stylistic territory on a four-track EP that finds Pleq's “Good Night” original (included on the forthcoming Ballet Mechanic full-length) presented in four iterations, one by Dziadosz himself and the others by remixers Philippe Lamy, Pjusk, and offthesky. Pleq's own version is a texture-heavy affair where the merest fragment of a piano melody hypnotically repeats while a lulling wave gently teeters alongside. In no hurry, the piece takes its time before adding to the initial piano motif but eventually does so with an additional figure. Pjusk amps up the textural dimension too by adding warm layers of static and softly glimmering tones but distances his rendering from Pleq's by including subtle strokes of electric guitar; it's hard not to be reminded of Fripp and Eno's Evening Star the moment the guitar unexpectedly joins the track's ambient material. What starts out as a more aggressive treatment by offthesky (Jason Corder) quickly turns gentle when the piano and harp motifs merge with soft electronic washes and tones. Lamy's treatment strikes me as the least satisfying of the four, simply because it loses much of the original's languorous flow by redirecting the focus to on an ever-mutating mass of whirr, click, and voice fragments; not surprisingly, the track's most appealing moments come towards the end when the original's piano melody surfaces. Somnambulent in character, the EP's material is often, just as its title indicates, an aural relaxant capable of inducing reverie, if not sleep altogether.

December 2010