Le Mepris - Echonomy Split Series #2 (2019)

Echonomy Series is looking to select works already released in small editions or download-onlies and to recontextualise them.

Le Mépris might be rather a means for creating music than a real person. Around 12 years ago, when a crowd mostly socialized with electronic music discovered classical instrumentation and new age composition, Le Mépris was subject to a minor media hype. The persona Reiko Matane was too good to be true: a young, fragile japanese woman with an alias from a Godard film creating exquisitly solemn piano miniatures, replacing Tokyo’s constant humming with solitude, creating a music as fragile as expected from a girl and as cool as any given dude’s selected classical ambient vinyl collection. No one wondered.

Back then, the real person behind Reiko and me sat down over a drink on a few occassions and wondered, but mostly, I was happy that my friend’s music got the attention it deserved, because nonetheless, Le Mépris‘ music is one of a certain solemnity and sad elegance. Its melancholy is excessive in that it leaves no room for any other feeling, it is cleansing; a kind of no-prisoners-taken ambient music you have to listen to, even if you attempt not to.

Now, Le Mépris is back. The two new pieces premiering here as a counterpart to a selection of previously released tracks find Le Mépris crawling deeper down into the dark realms of solitude; gone is the innocent pop appeal of the former releases. While delay and reverb were accompanying voices in the past, leaving ghostly traces of piano, these dynamics have vanished in favour of effect-laden dirges where the piano of ten years ago is more like a mirroring input for a growing, self-feeding system. These new transmissions are recalling the old recordings, they are a recorded memory, an ancient organism: lowest possible movement, polyphone rustling and humming, a music working on getting silent.