Franch - 2012 - Orsini

Electronica

[FOR FREE]

http://franch.bandcamp.com/

• 4 songs to download
• For free
• Direct Download
• Listening recommendations: Ravachol

Impressions

If you wanted experimental electronica, this is the album you were waiting for. Taking excellent beats and riffs and then repeating them ad nauseum is usually not a good idea for an interesting or enjoyable listen, let alone one in a genre that relies on them so handily. And yet Orsini never got boring or annoying in its repetition. This is sounding a lot more strangely negative than I had envisioned, because believe me, Orsini is an EP I really enjoyed. It's just that the song structures Franch employs seem so counter intuitive – take an ambient keyboard loop, repeat the fuck out of it for an obscene amount of time, do the same with [an admittedly intense, if funky] drum and bass, adding only the occasional extra element from time to time to make sure the audience is still actively with you (the bridge on “Dieu et l'Etat” for instance; where the low end drops out completely and is replaced with synthetic-sounding horns/wind instruments of some kind (sax maybe?)). Maybe I'm full of shit and there are entire subgenres of music built around this idea that Brian Eno created at some point in the 70's or 80's I'm just not familiar with (likely). To me, this record is greater than the sum of its parts, as cliche as that might sound. Franch have made exceptional use of their bag of tricks, even if on paper it might not seem like it should work. There may even be a story of 14/15^th century Italian aristocracy tucked away in here. Yeah, Orsini's rabbit hole is a lot more complex than it seems. And you'd be remiss to turn it away.