It has been a while since we talked about the records that dare to confront. Vallées, the latest collaboration between French experimentalists Seb Brun and Simon Henocq, falls squarely into those releases that shapeshift the boundaries of non-conventional music. It’s a well-organized yet disorienting listening experience that keeps the listener engaged from start to finish, and in that disorientation lies its great power. Brun and Henocq, long-standing figures within the French experimental music community, crafted an album that shakes with intensity, pulling threads from musique concrète, glitch, industrial, and noise while reasserting rhythm as the fractured skeleton of their sound. Listening to Vallées feels less like entering a cavern carved from sound itself. The duo relies heavily on processed drums and guitar, but the instrumentation is so manipulated, stretched, and disassembled that you can sometimes hardly point to a snare hit or a chord progression in the conventional sense. Instead, drums morph into seismic quakes, samples dissolve into shrill shards of metallic resonance. It’s a musical experience where familiar tools are atomized, rearranged, and presented as alien organisms. Many noise or industrial records retreat into sheer brutality, a wall of aggression that leaves little space for nuance. Brun and Henocq resist that impulse. Their sound is dense, and at times almost overwhelming, but it also makes room for contemplation. The compositions are full of air, full of tension that stretches and contracts. The silences matter as much as the eruptions.
The album pulses with rhythmic patterns, but more as a fractured, hypnotic undertow. In one moment, you’ll hear something like a decaying heartbeat rendered in metallic echoes, and then syncopated bursts that border on ritualistic drumming before collapsing into static. This rhythmic backbone docks the abstraction, ensuring that this record never drifts entirely into chaos. Vallées is pretty much a study in transformation. Sounds begin as one thing and end as another, sometimes violently, sometimes so gradually that the shift is imperceptible until you realize the sonic landscape has mutated entirely. A guitar string might become a drone, then a shriek, then a bass thrum. A percussive hit might morph into a cascading glitch. This constant flux mirrors the instability of our contemporary moment, the feeling that nothing remains fixed, that solidity is always under threat of erosion. Everything is sculpted with precision. There’s rawness, distortion, and grittiness, but it is very intentional. You sense the duo’s long history in the French experimental scene, their refusal to lean on gimmickry or trend-chasing. This is the work of musicians who understand the tradition they are building upon, musique concrète, industrial pioneers, noise visionaries, and the necessity of pushing forward into new territory. It resists easy consumption and refuses the neat structures of pop or the predictable tropes of electronic subgenres, yet it is not an act of nihilism. Purpose and beauty lie beneath the piles of noise. Not beauty in the conventional sense, but the beauty of risk, vulnerability, and honesty. It dares to show itself raw and unadorned, jagged edges and all.
For listeners accustomed to melody, harmony, and traditional songcraft, Vallées may feel alienating, but that is precisely its point. It challenges us to expand our understanding of what music can be, to sit with discomfort, to embrace sound not as background but as confrontation. It recalls the best of experimental art, not because it seeks novelty for novelty’s sake, but because it insists that the medium still holds unexplored possibilities. And yet, the album is strangely immersive. Once you surrender to its world, you find yourself carried along by its strange logic. The hypnotic pulses, the abrasive textures, the moments of near-silence, they create a narrative arc, one that bypasses the rational mind and operates on a deeper register. This material seeks your full attention, patience, and openness. It is not an album designed to please, but to provoke, unsettle, and move you in ways that are not always comfortable. In doing so, it demonstrates the relevance of experimental music as an artistic practice and a cultural necessity. It is a work that deconstructs conventions while affirming the body, a record that transforms noise into closeness, chaos into structure, sound into flesh. It is about standing in the middle of a storm of sound and realizing that the storm has its own language, pulse, and its own strange beauty. It is about giving up the need to control and allowing yourself to be carried by something larger, something elemental. Vallées is dense, raw, and sensual. It is a record that collapses boundaries and creates new ones. It is, in the truest sense, alive.