Over the course of the six years that French producer Erwan Castex has been releasing records under the moniker Rone, the main throughline in his work has been a casual disregard for the usual functional categories of electronic music. Existing somewhere in the intersection points of an imagined venn diagram between dance-y beatmaking, ambient composition, and neon-tinted synth-driven film scores, he's cannily zeroed in on making music for similarly liminal headspaces. On his third full-length Creatures, both for better and worse, Castex doubles down on the in-betweenness of his compositions.
Part of the trickiness in pinning down Castex's newest LP stems from the seemingly disjointed stable of guests he enlisted to help in its construction. There's assists from the narcotized Montreal ambient act Sea Oleena, Francois Marry of the staid multinational indie pop crew Francois and the Atlas Mountain, avant-jazz trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, and Bryce Dessner of the National (to whom Castex offered production help on Trouble Will Find Me). It's a diverse cast of players that represents the whole spectrum of his varied interests, and it shows in the final product on Creatures.
Occasionally, as on "Sir Orfeo", he's able to parlay the disorienting nature of this conceptual variety into emotionally complex investigations of the spaces between musical worlds. Building from reverberating keyboard plinks to distant, labyrinthine vocals from Sea Oleena, Castex eventually settles into a narcoleptic synth-pop track that plays like a more optimistic version of Massive Attack, but not before he offers up a couple of dystopian vocal drones and teeth-chattering kick drum drops. It's this sort of exercise that Castex performs when Creatures is at its best—to hold fast his otherworldly concoction of genre-defying beatwork, while allowing each guest to pull him a little further toward their own sphere and the spectral middle ground that he so loves to explore.
And yet despite the gleeful discontinuousness of these high points, Creatures has a major Achilles heel in the form of Castex' newfound penchant for dramatic instrumental swells and grabbing at swooning emotions that are ripped from the pages of more heavy-handed post-rock acts. After closing out "Roads", a brief interstitial featuring a man reading what seems to be a particularly brutal tour itinerary, the album's closing suite relies on a heightened emotion that detracts from Castex's intricate tinkering. Tracks like "Roads" work because they're content to sit and stew in their minimal melodic parts, to wholly explore the mishmash of genre ideas that he's playing with at any given moment. So when something like "Calice Texas" suddenly and unexpectedly roars into a skyward vocal part, it can feel unearned.
Creatures nevertheless remains engaging for how these largely collaborative constructions highlight the stunning omnivorousness that Castex has been able to imbue in his solo recordings. In jumping from ambient pieces to barbed synth arpeggios and then all the way back to a mechanistic clatter that evokes his earliest efforts, he's given himself the freedom to capably follow his every artistic impulse over the course of the record's 12 tracks. Egregiously melodramatic missteps aside, Creatures exists as a reminder that out there in the between of electronic music are swirling, delirious spaces that are yet to be explored.
