Sucre du Sauvage is as much an exhibition catalog as it is an album. Quintron and wife/collaborator/puppeteer Miss Pussycat recorded these tracks during a three-month residency at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where he built a makeshift studio and hung a few 19th century portraits for inspiration. Each morning he would clock in and spend the day laying down heavy beats, short jams, snippets of melody, and random sonic sketches, all in full view of every museumgoer who wandered over to his corner of the gallery. The creative process became the end product, which makes the resulting album a curious chronicle of its creation as well as a musical statement.
That environment proves particularly inspiring for the duo, whose oddball grooves and puppet-show vocals come across as Deep South outsider art among the Gauguins and Pissarros, and their comic-book imagery-- full of anthropomorphic petting zoos, glam-rock bands, and shampoo lather-- acts as a pop contrast to the fine art on the walls. These songs are all commotion: eccentric grooves that never bend or move as expected, as if Quintron has tapped an infinite variety of raunchy organ riffs and Drum Buddy beats. If in the past his songs have been austere in their jubilant energy, employing only the instruments he could play at one time, he takes advantage of the museum environs and paints with a wider palette of sounds, from birdcalls to timpani to what sounds like a xylophone made of frogs.
Opener "Ring the Alarm", fiercely jittery rather than outright aggressive, features a solo that could have been played on every keyboard-based instrument all at once, and "Spirit Hair", with Pussycat on vocals, hinges on a dexterous whistle sample courtesy of Grace Wilson, the museum's Manager of Communications and Marketing. Occasionally, the living exhibition becomes interactive, with Quintron playing the crowd for handclaps, clatter, and backing vocals. "So what so what so what!" they chant on "Kicked Out of Zolar X", and it's not hard-- but it is extremely entertaining-- to imagine the long-dead portrait subjects chanting along from inside their frames.
Sucre du Sauvage begins loud and dense, with organ licks that sound like several planes landing on the same strip, but as it progresses, Quintron pares the music to its most basic elements, creating an increasingly deeper sense of space with each song. During the final weeks on display, he set up a tent in the sculpture garden and lived on the grounds, making extensive field recordings of bird screeches, traffic, trains, wind, and thunder, among other clatter. On the album's second half, these sounds coalesce into strange assemblages, and at first the effect is like seeing a Robert Ryman after spending an hour in front of a Miró: The seeming absence of stimuli makes it sound dull by comparison, but eventually subtle shapes begin to form. Wind noise becomes a phalanx of drummers, quack sounds suggest a band of ducks, and the grounds come across as a naturally musical environment.
While such transformations are pleasant, if not exactly commanding, they do manage to slyly deconstruct the "real" songs into the most basic building blocks, which are very specific to this setting. In that sense Sucre du Sauvage plays like a companion to Quintron's 2010 7" single "Tire Shop", which featured vocals by local personality King Lee and sound effects recorded at the St. Claude Tire Shop, which was one of the few businesses to remain open during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Both that single and the new album sound like loving odes to the city itself, as Quintron turns all of New Orleans into a musical instrument.
