Classical music begins with blood and guts. The first violins were strung with sheep intestines, while early timpanis bore heads made from goatskin. The conservatory-bound spend years blistering, bruising, and contorting themselves, sometimes to the point of permanent damage. On the Francis Bacon-inspired cover of her new album, Noémi Büchi lies splayed out and bloodied on a plastic sheet, a sight that evokes both a cocoon and a Dexter kill room. Büchi, a Swiss-French sound artist and classically trained pianist—the late Romantic period and early modernist periods are her province—titled her new album after the Latin “exuviae.” To Virgil, these were the spoils stripped from an enemy combatant’s body; to a modern-day entomologist, they’re the husks left behind by molting insects like cicadas. On Exuvie, Büchi sloughs off the buffed metal carapace of her previous records, exposing the gore underneath.
To borrow one of its song titles, Exuvie is an assemblage of “dislocated bodies,” spare parts from across genres and centuries that Büchi stitches back together. “the cryptic precision” practically staggers up from the slab, its limbs reattached at odd angles. Arca and Lotic, two other artists known for gleefully Frankensteining the organic and the artificial, cast long shadows in the doorway. Across Exuvie, Büchi induces a state of temporary autophony, a condition in which internal body sounds like breathing and blinking are amplified to maddening volume. Opener and lead single “I was always there” is easier to describe in terms of its pure vibrational qualities than with analogies to physical instruments: a thud, a rattle, a shiver. An unexpected genetic ancestor turns out to be Amnesia Scanner, whose frazzled early singles rebuilt trap at the microbial scale in the mid-2010s.
Despite her pedigree, Büchi is anything but a purist. One can imagine her trawling modular-synthesis Discord servers late into the night, or scavenging the digital outlands for post-dubstep detritus. Throw some syncopated bass on “structure undone” and you’ve recreated Girl Unit’s “Wut.” Büchi even shares HudMo and Lunice’s taste for synthetic brass; assuming advanced alien civilizations still have monarchs, “beneath form” could serve as their royal fanfare. And if Los Thuthanaka praised Mahler and Brahms instead of the Aymara pantheon, it might sound something like “a divided surface.” Exuvie’s least remarkable composition, “I suppose,” is the one Büchi doesn’t twist into some freakish amalgam. Still, it’s illuminating to trace her fascinations across time, from Baroque counterpoint to early arcade game soundtracks to contemporary glitchcore.
Exuvie is Büchi’s first album to deploy her voice in identifiable form—in the sense that a murder victim can be identified by their teeth. On “dislocated bodies,” snippets of speech clot and lyse around an elliptical piano motif: “I am exhausted.” “I’ve had quite the day.” “I’m not a ballerina.” Passion optimized for performance so often becomes a prison. “Music creation in school and an institutional context has always been difficult for me,” Büchi said in 2021. Growing up, she loved improvising but couldn’t wrap her head around the minutiae of notation. Today, an upright piano and Roland keyboard share pride of place in her home recording studio. Büchi approaches classical music not like an embalmer with a corpse but as a surgeon with a patient, taking a scalpel to the vestigial organs. All the blood just means it’s still alive.
