Reviews:

(Electronic Cottage) Collision Stories is the San Francisco based quartet of Jorge Bachman, Bryan Day, Michael Gendreau, and Mason Jones. I’ve been a fan of Mason Jones since his SubArachnoid Space days. Bryan Day is a veteran experimental music maker and has released oodles of great recordings on his Public Eyesore label. Michael Gendreau dates back to the 1980s in Crawling With Tarts (duo with Suzanne Dycus) and probably loads of other projects I’m unaware of. Jorge Bachmann is the one member who is new to me. As a fan of both abstract sound constructions and wigged out psychedelic excursions, I enjoyed the morphing, mixing, and atom smashing of these realms that characterizes Avant L’Obscurité. The album was recorded during a pre pandemic January 2020 and consists of two side-long pieces (I have the LP). Side A starts right off with a cacophony of high intensity, yet strangely carnivalesque delirium. It’s a lysergic cauldron of motor speedway, street corner organ grinder, gurgling lip smacks, windy drones, high tension wire unraveling, and other noisy and diddly effects. It’s a gripping roller coaster ride, though the music ebbs and flows, with relatively quieter passages that are propelled by mind-bending percussion patterns, searing, minimal synths drones, playfully zany keyboard melodies, alien insect swarms, and dashes of spectral Kosmiche. Side B expands on these themes, starting off with thudding percussion that penetrated my chest cavity, and a killer blend of intensely noisy chaos, whimsical effects, and meditative Kosmiche. But the mood again fluctuates between sonic assault and cosmically exploratory segments. The Collision Stories Bandcamp page describes: ‘Instruments and sounds vary, including analog and digital synths, guitar, bass, drums, turntables, and homemade sound machines.’ Sounds like Avant L’Obscurité employs all of these and more. - Daevid Brock