Ensemble Economique

***BRIAN PYLE’s work under the ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE banner has been undergoing heavy shift lately, prompted by both creative restlessness as well as inner life upheavals. He’s quested out on 2 lone wolf UK/Euro tours in the past half-year alone, plus dropped an ace LP on the Dekorder label of ominous soundtrack menace. When rapid transformation takes hold, it’s best to just roll tape and make sense of it later. Thus, in anticipation of his forthcoming 2012 NNF full-length, we present EE: Live In London, an impressively recorded 37-minute performance at The Vortex in August of last year, comprised of all new material. Primitive drum machine rhythms stutter in primal-industrial patterns, cloaked in disquieting drones and oblique tape samples (police sirens, jungle bird calls, Sinead O’Connor vocal raptures), accompanied by pained crooning, ragged squalls of electric guitar, and minor-key synth depressions. More song-based than his voodoo hallucination breakthrough, 2010’s Psychical, but no less unsettling, the new Economique approach has shades of Eyeless In Gaza’s eerie, fatalist drift but the thrust is some sort of goth-psych/beat music hybrid that we’re not aware even really exists yet. A captivating document of an artist at the crossroads. White, imprinted tapes with high-art jazz-splatter J-cards designed by AMANDA BROWN. Edition of 150.