Most people believe that humans are the only intelligent beings on the planet, and language is the peg they usually hang this uniqueness on. Language holds us together: the ability to communicate with abstract symbols is universal among cultures and innate to all individuals exposed to it. And language has set us apart, leading to all the advances-- agriculture, industry, social organization-- that have allowed us to dominate other vertebrates, including other humans. It's clear what language is good for, if not exactly how it works.
If you think about it, music is just as universal and unique. But is it adaptive? Darwin thought it was an elaborate mating call. Others have claimed it's more like ritual cement, good for aligning people with each other. Of course, it might just be a way to let our auditory minds blow off a little steam from the usual verbal grind. And then there's evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, who has suggested that music is "cultural cheesecake," serving no adaptive function at all. Music may not be adaptive, but music does adapt, so maybe we should be asking about the evolution of music itself, about the way we play host to a variety of competing sound memes.
Which is all to say: Ask not what you require of the music; but what the music requires of you. That's the right attitude to have when you enter Mani, the debut release from Dorine Muraille. Having previously recorded an artefact under the name Gel, French composer Julien Locquet is no stranger to what some are calling laptop-folk. The sounds he brings to Mani are from demure and folky sources-- a muted piano, a children's song, a ukulele-- but they're so finely chopped up and swirled around that the project comes off as a series of thought experiments in fluid dynamics. It might help to cling to the voice of poetess Chloe Delaume, whose abstract work is featured prominently. But better would be to let the debris wash right through you as it gets ripped up, scattered, drenched, fed into itself, rinsed, squeezed, and sometimes laid out to dry.
The anti-authoritarian bathroom scrawl on the back of the album may have been trying to warn me. But Mani doesn't want me to keep approaching music the way I know how, as hooks and verses, loops and layers, or even beginnings, middles and ends. Rather, I think part of Mani wants me to be a machine, and part of it wants me to be an animal. Let me explain. The opening track, "Le Supplice de la Bagnoire", is wildly soothing given how little there is to latch onto. A needle drag, a simple piano figure, some vinyl dust, snatches of guitar and female voice-- that's it, and the rest is just these moments blowing around in the white-tiled vacuum of an antique restroom, then getting worked into your scalp like a therapeutic shampoo. The expressive result is somewhere between a lullaby and an emergency eyewash. It's stunning, in an inhuman way.
Then "Bbraallen" starts up with a chaotic ukulele and a real live beat, but soon degenerates into an awkward freeform accompaniment to some god-awful field recording of the tired old ballad "Barbara Allen". If the title is an indication that Muraille is trying to bring out a minimal doubleness in this song, then surely he has failed. The next track butchers a French nursery rhyme in much the same way. But then a track uses song in just the right way, letting it get swallowed up in a grainy storm of tactus-jamming ticks and blaring digital clip, having an expressive effect somewhere between raw predation and hard-drive failure. The gentle piano improvisations that fill out the back end of the album are interrupted by something that sounds like a cross between a campfire and a water filtration plant. And then a vibraphone trio warms up, only to be drenched in sweet acid rain through an open roof.
If music were like most other forms of animal behavior, it would have to have come about gradually as the result of a series of adaptations. But is it possible that the capacity for music, like language, is a result of the lucky misuse of hardware evolved for other purposes? And if so, do we now have other latent capacities just waiting to be misused in precisely the right ways? If enough people listen to stuff like Mani, we may soon find out.
