Véhicule - Maison​/​Forêt

Deep within the aural expanse, music and sound collide. Wind instruments playing in peaceful tranquility, fending of swarms of buzzing insects. Twisted notes bob in the air above orchestral tactfulness, a voice reads instructions for the experience we intake. All things come to rest and then reset to go again. Véhicule takes the realm of what we know and turns it ever so slightly. Now we hear the sophistication of generations of music evolution, but next to this is a pleasantly unfamiliar arrangement of unrecognizable beauty. 

Maison​/​Forêt flows with a refreshing current of peaceful tones. With ten tracks in forty minutes of composition, there is plenty of time for pieces to develop. Véhicule takes melodies and draws them in long expanses. They become the canvas for drifting obscurities mutating above like sun drenched cumulus cloud formations. Véhicule also pulls sounds from the melancholy depths. "March" is a good example of a strikingly more somber approach. Rhythms crackle from a worn vinyl record, as a droning blanket warms from above. "Bois flotté " lifts tones to include spoken word recited in almost prayer like patterns, piano giving way to the reoccurring interlude titled "Piano fence #3", the third on the album. The last and longest track "Traces" could be the opus of Maison​/​Forêt, a selection combining many of the feelings experienced while traveling to this point, then sending listeners into a hypnotizing trance of their own conscious. 

Sylvain Milliot is the person responsible for Véhicule. Maison​/​Forêt seems to be the second full length for the Véhicule project. The first titled Le Temps Du Chien out on Midira Records in 2019 and still available on cassette from the label. Midira Records also has a digital release by Véhicule out in 2020 titled Live Paris and listenable on their bandcamp page. The sonic gem in this description, Maison​/​Forêt, is out on the Flophouse label from Michigan. As with all of the releases on Flophouse, the artwork and paper stock push to appreciations of higher levels. Although humbly not mentioned on the Flophouse bandcamp page for Maison​/​Forêt, it looks like every cover for this cassette is unique and special. And.... mastering by Stephan Mathieu will close how good this release is.

Links 

Flophouse - bandcamp