Album Review: Sonnet II by Benoit Pioulard

I hate to toss around a phrase like “transcendental magic,” but I fear it’s one I have used a few too many times on Anhedonic Headphones, so perhaps it doesn’t mean quite as much as it used to in the early days of this blog.

With that being said, there are moments of said transcendental magic on the new Benoit Pioulard effort, Stanza II, a recently released companion album to the aptly titled Stanza I, which, in turn, was a companion piece to an album I deemed “hot fire” earlier in the year—Sonnet.

Benoit Pioulard is a clunky nom de plume of one Thomas Meluch, who has built a career out of darting back and forth between ambient, fucked up tape loop manipulations, and psychedelic pop music; and for my tastes, he is infinitely better at the former, rather than the latter.

Stanza II is comprised of seven pieces of music, five of which are untitled (just labeled as roman numerals) and all of which are six minutes apiece (though iTunes estimates some at 6:01.) And, they are all achingly beautiful, somber, and thought provoking experimental drones; sounds created by who knows how. I mean if Meluch told us, it’d spoil the mystery surrounding an album like this.

This may also be a good time to visit Stanza I, which I apparently slept on somehow, or didn’t think to download. It came out in April—roughly a month after Sonnet was released. Both Stanza albums are self-released, via Meluch’s Bandcamp page. They were originally issued as limited edition CD-Rs in handmade packaging, but those are all long gone now.

Stanza is made up of seven tracks, six of which are exactly four minutes, and the also all evoke a similar feeling as their counterparts do.

While they are an interesting (yet not completely essential) listen, indulging in enough ambient experimental tape manipulations can take its toll on you. The problem here, with these, is that the pieces all start to sound very similar; a little too similar actually. There was more than one occasion when listening to both of these records that I had to stop and ask myself if I had already heard this one.

Obviously, this is to say that not every moment of the Stanza albums transcendental. As II concludes, “Held In,” arrives sounding a bit like an early-Sigur Ros track, meaning it’s an ominous low drone, while the rest of the record is anything but ominous. It’s not light, either, or meant to be taken lightly. Quite the contrary, actually. It’s meant to be taken rather seriously—at its finest moments, it evokes that perfect quiet introspection where at a certain point, you stop listening to the music—or at least, you become less aware that you are listening to the music, and it just surrounds you.

Both Stanza albums are available to download now from the man himself.