(Dead Angel) Mathias Delpanque brings the laptop and objects, Oldman brings the acoustic bass, electric guitar, and more objects, and the duo -- captured live at the Chapelle de L'Oratoire in Nantes, France in September, 2007 -- use these eclectic items to create four lengthy slices of freely improvised soundscapes. As with most of the albums released on Eh?, these pieces are less about songs in a conventional sense and more about textures, dynamics, and the juxtaposition of odd sounds. The first track ("Part 1") makes effective use of the stage space and the healing power of reverb, with repetitive mechanical sounds and mild clattering playing out over gradually building washes of drone and occasional bursts of twangy guitar; the sound starts out in minimal fashion and eventually grows fuller and denser over thirteen-plus minutes, before eventually doing a slow fade into oblivion. "Part 2" is more of a drone-oriented affair; there are more muted mechanical sounds, true, but the piece is dominated mainly by free-floating swells of what might be reverb-heavy bass or guitar. Those swells do grow to apocalyptic proportions on occasion, but otherwise the piece noodles along in soporific dark-ambient fashion, drifting like fog across a midnight landscape. In "Part 3," the focus is more on cryptic noises made by the aforementioned (and unidentified) objects, as short bass and guitar lines plunk away periodically in the background. "Part 4" is essentially a variation on the same theme -- different sounds, more reverb, same basic vibe. The interesting thing is how subdued the album is as a whole; despite the convergence of unusual sounds, the muted approach to the noise-making and the application of ambient drone in the background renders the album quiet most of the time, which makes the few moments of rising sound all the more dramatic when they appear. This is also considerably creepier-sounding than the average improvised album, which only adds to the mystique. - RKF