On Bare Ground

White vinyl with obi strip.

On Bare Ground is Red Brut’s third full album to date and is a sensation in its own right. The tape composer and concrete poet relocated from Rotterdam to the far North. Along the way, ballast was left behind; she stripped down her unique musical dialect of tape-warbled sound snippets and distant parlando. What’s left? A collection of well-chosen scraps: a poem, a piano loop, subliminal sounds, and an enigma.

The Enigma: it is almost impossible to describe when it unveils itself, but if it’s there, you will undoubtedly recognize it. The new appears as something that has always been there but not yet heard. The event unveils and makes itself heard.
Red Brut masters this fine art of unveiling the unheard. How? I would say: by composing with the most ‘literal’ of sounds—those you ignore when you encounter them in day-to-day life. I suppose that’s the core of concréte music (and poetry alike; maybe art in general): unveiling, showing, and pointing toward those things that exist but aren’t yet seen, heard, perceived, or felt.

“I became aware” is spoken in one of the tracks. On Bare Ground could be documenting a process in which a fabric is subtly altered through an unnoticeable act so that the very essence of that fabric suddenly reveals itself. Perhaps we are witnessing the exciting and startling event of a metamorphosis? What is certain is that this record engages you in the inviting sensation of perceiving the enigma—those sparkling, joyful moments of realizing you’ve just heard something in a new, vivid way.

– by Niels Latomme