When artists team up for a collaboration it’s difficult not to wonder which artist’s influence will weigh heaviest in the results. For their album La grande accumulation, Turkish artist Anadol and French artist Marie Klock have succeeded in bringing out a zaniness in each other. While Klock’s slightly manic energy and her rapid-fire vocals are the most immediate presence on the album, Anadol’s ability to corral and collage so many disparate elements is what glues things together.
La grande accumulation – literally the great accumulation – holds as a thesis for the album, with its magpie approach of making collected pieces fit together. Spontaneous asides bubble up throughout the songs, competing rhythms weave through one channel and escape out another, and trombones provide an unexpected roughness to largely keyboard based songs.
The spirit of the album is playful and sometimes camp (noted with the caveat of not having sufficient French language skills to assess the lyrics). These feelings are particularly notable on the opening title track of the album, with its whimsical and haphazard patterns, and closing track ‘La rein des bordels’, whose programmed-sounding rhythm track goes completely off the rails like a wacky children’s show. Both of these tracks stretch to eight minutes, allowing for dramatic shifts in focus, undercurrents of haunted house electric organs, and for Klock’s vocals to run the gamut of whispers, chants, spoken word and even a bit of singing.
Percussion plays an interesting role as texture rather than keeping time. The popping clack on ‘La grande accumulation’ and the gentle steam engine chugging of ‘Quand le grenier aura pris feu’ are just transient layers of their piecemeal songs. ‘Sonate au jambon’ has a percussive element that could as easily be a muted string instrument as a percussion instrument or a synth.
This blurring between the the electronic and the acoustic is a recurring quality of La grande accumulation. Songs frequently pose a question of whether they are made up of a piano or a keyboard, a guitar or a keyboard, a human vocal or a keyboard. ‘Quand le grenier aura pris feu’ features whistling as a supporting instrument, but there’s a melting of the sound that makes it difficult to decipher whether it’s Anadol or Klock whistling or a sound created on a synth. It’s not a matter of great significance how the sounds are created, but if you want to geek out on details then the guessing game is a good bit of fun.
