For Emmanuel Hubaut, the mischievous poet behind Les Tétines Noires and LTNO, who is also active in Dead Sexy Inc and Pest Modern with his father, visual artist Joël Hubaut (recordman of camembert throw, according to Wikipedia), music is not just a matter of sound waves. In his synaesthetic reveries, sound takes on a physical existence and becomes a material in which to sculpt, textures to rub against... And these objects, in turn, become reveries. His experimental ambient / noise project EHb is the latest culmination of an approach that frees itself from boundaries and rules, whether artistic or physical.
As befits the genre, Fragments de Sables Émouvants is not an accessible work. Long stretches of experimentation follow on from tracks lasting just a few seconds, while the personality of its creator is reflected in the titles and their mysterious wordplay, somewhere between surrealist exquisite corpse and opaque alchemical formula. It's all about alchemy: EHb transforms its material and its approach gives off an unreal perfume, like the opaque ritual-like opening track Abîme d'Artifices. If the drones invite meditation, this is regularly disturbed. The whispers and echoes of ghostly percussion on Tumus and Amanites provide a texture that is both organic and spectral, the brass zigzagging limply through the hallucinatory industrial coldness of Ivresse en Eaux Céladon, the density of the guitar on Stalactites, the noisy aggression of Souleur de Profundis, the inverted sounds of Amatombe and the impression that everything is falling apart, that time and space no longer have any head or tail, with a haggard saxophone lost in a Lynchian haze. .. Fragments de Sables Émouvants is full of ideas, games and wanderings.
And it is in this paradox that we can best recognise Emmanuel Hubaut's creativity and poetry: from experiments that we might fear to be austere and hermetic, he succeeds in extracting playful, melancholic and oppressive monsters. From a heap of various inanimate things, he obtains life. The melodies are few and far between, but the emotions are catapulted into incongruous places, the time for a dissonance or a meditative interlude. These side-steps, which we guess are happy chance improvisations, give Fragments de Sables Émouvants its humanity: this is the work of a mad scientist who, far from writing down his formulas, doesn't follow any recipe.
