Sylvain Chauveau's S. is short (just over 20 minutes), simple, and focused; a mini-thesis on tone's relationship, and dependence, on space. The subject is a deep well, often tapped by experimental artists and classical composers alike since the early 20th century, and their consciousness of the subject has only increased with time. Perhaps because of its brevity, S. stands as a fairly succinct example of this newer, self-aware, spatial aesthetic (though on a purely aural basis, it isn't quite as successful as, say, Rafael Toral's similarly themed Space Solo 1 from earlier this year). Chauveau succeeds by creating a fluctuating pulse, then either filling the spaces between each pulse with light electronics or an instrument's slow decay. As each note eases into silence, you become acutely aware of tones in their pure form and can look at them as either part of a bigger structure, a measure of music, or as a single sound in and of itself.
Again, the result is simple and focused in highlighting a theme, but spare enough to reduce much of the album to mental exercises. Furthermore, none of the base sounds on S. are particularly jarring or overtly stimulating. There is conceptual dissonance, but no aural dissonance, which creates a clean, inoffensively blank space in which Chauveau's ideas rest. This isn't to say that if some element is present in concept it must be represented in tone, but all the tones -- the music -- of S. is neutral enough to push any present conceptual aspects to the fore, which makes the work, as an album, on a record label, somewhat displaced and adrift. I suppose therein lies the true ‘dissonance’ of S., that it will probably be listened to in the privacy of one's home, in the context of, for all intents and purposes, a rock album. It's like moving a heavily conceptual painting out of a gallery and onto your wall, which, judging from history, dramatically alters an artistic movement's impact on the person and culture as a whole. While S. is an undoubtedly interesting exercise, it's ultimately too singular to rise above the fast-moving stream of the cultural progression it represents.
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