Tresque - Estampi (2017)

Electronic music used to be seen as avant-garde bringing a "future
shock." We are learning more and more to treat it as just another
folk music, not so much about escaping tradition and accelerating
anything but just drifting away, shuffling between different notions
of time and space, reconnecting with our own past and territories,
building new islands.

Tresque takes his name after a medieval dance of which we know little of.
His path in music resonates with most of our interest as a label. He got
into music through dub, electronica, jungle and other electronic music
styles, and then dove into electroacoustic music. Most of his other
current projects under the "D’incise" moniker relates to this
approach. But the ghost of the pulse got a hold on him,
making him lean towards what he calls a "fantasy of techno".

In the last few years, there has been a renewed interest in french
music for the regional sounds and traditions as best exemplified by
the work of La Novia collective, the records by the Standard In-Fi
label, and the use of the bourdon as a drone instrument. The music,
both then and now, is linked to dance events (bals) and folk dances
like the bourrée from Auvergne.

Long before the Chicago dances to Juke and Footwork, people from
Auvergne were stomping an unstable and relentless rythm with their
feet. A rhythm that, like what Mark Butler found in techno, works with
ambiguity and metric dissonance, blurring the beginning into the end,
and vice-versa.

Tresque is looking for what he calls "circular time." Estampi, meaning stomping with the feet in Occitan, is following these loops, linking techno, concrete music and traditional dance. If you find it repetitive, maybe you're listening too hard.

Or as Tresque puts it- remixing what Niblock once said about drone-
"no breaks no hands in the hair no bullshit."