Born in Lebanon in 1980, it's no doubt evident by the overdriven scree underscoring his contribution to Staalplaat's Mort Aux Vaches series that Tarek Atoui brings his birthplace's tumultuous sociopolitical clashes headfirst into the fray. An ardent user of Max/MSP software, his music partakes liberally from the French think tanks of electroacoustic composition, referencing Parmegiani, Ferrari, even some of the sinister grand guignol operatics of Pierre Henry. It all makes perfect sense, since Atoui currently serves as co-artistic director of the fertile EAI studios housed at Steim in Amsterdam; aspects of his particular method of cut-'n'-paste collage and found noise also recalls California sound artist Naut Humon's singular Sound Traffic Control multimedia events, in addition to Humon's similar early 80s experimental mash-ups hosted under the guise of post-industrialist mavericks Rhythm and Noise.
Initially, Atoui's debut comes across as a bludgeoning exercise in overwrought sampledelica, a Dadaist splatterfest far too convoluted and complicated for its own good. First impressions, however, are often deceiving, as that hoary chestnut goes: Atoui might be as adept at this electroacoustic/musique concréte thing as his mentors, but more tellingly, he clearly has an agenda in mind. Across this EP's six tracks, ideas, images, and infamy speed over the earscape with lightning-like ferocity, Atoui juxtaposing a wealth of uncompromising sounds upon a blood-speckled canvas. Unlike the faux-political grandstanding of Muslimgauze, Atoui's display of malice doesn't stop at geographical barriers, ideologies, or talking-head newscast escapism; slicing up the rhythmic terrain with occasional bursts of gabba, breakcore, and open-air market hip-hop that never quite takes shape (beats rebound off all sonic surfaces with slaps rather than coatings), Atoui's cinematic onslaught flicker-frames its sounds quickly and urgently. Something of an aural polemic rather than travelogue, as beats pummel the air like munitions fire, there's arcing cries and pitiful wailing; street talk trades airtime with empty rhetoric, broadcaster's headlines are drowned out by stop-start electronics and dirty atmospherics. In its brazen manner, a sonic totalitarianism wins out, more so to vividly illustrate the night terrors that must occupy Atoui's imagination before he commits those fears to disc. Certainly electroacoustic cut-up doesn't have to be all light and fuzzy embraces: Atoui emphasizes as such, shocking the new world order accordingly.
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