SONOGRAM - Arrival Lounge

Although Todd Gautreau set up his label, Simulacra, a few years ago in Chicago, he moved to Dallas, Texas, where he still lives, in 1993. During the nineties, Todd spent most of his time concentrating on Tear Ceremony, an ambient project he started in 1990, under which name he has released four albums so far. In 1999, he released the first Sonogram album, Heartbeat Submarines, which, if still very reflective, presented a wider range of sounds and ambiences. The album received critical acclaim all over the world, and after nearly three years of silence, Sonogram returns with Arrival Lounge.
More intrinsically electronic than Gautreau’s other project, Sonogram collects some rather unusual sounds and bleeps assembled around more recognizable electric pianos, guitars or flutes, organised into low-key constructions. For the first time, Gautreau works with beats, although the compositions remain mainly contemplative. Arrival Lounge opens with the beautiful title track, a sort of nonchalant space jazz for the twenty first century. Here, electronic elements only support the piano and occasional sax, while a repressed bass line draws groovy arabesques in the background. Hummer very much develops from the same mood, but the balance between purely electronic and acoustic sounds is reversed, creating a negative image of the opening track. Gautreau plays further with these alternative effects very much all along this album, but it is not strictly the purpose of Arrival Lounge. It very much feels as if he uses Sonogram as a decoy, allowing him to explore less strictly ambient spheres while retaining the very atmospheric character of his past work. If tracks such as Portal or Pixel Dust are surprisingly upbeat, even if the later sounds too much like a techno cliché for its own good, it is on the more introvert side of this project that his compositional skills remain the strongest. Gautreau has always claimed to find more inspiration in the cinema of Cocteau or the poetry of Desnos than in the music world, and his compositions have a definite cinematic twist to them. Beautiful creations such as Proximity, Dramamine, Mood Ring, the short interlude of Soft Geometry, or Aeronaut are all intense and evocative. Elsewhere, on Topless Summer or Hovering The Velodrome, the production proves to be slightly too constrained and predictable to allow the tracks to evolves freely enough. Arrival Lounge remains however an enjoyable record, perhaps thanks to its imperfections as much as its captivating moments.
With Sonogram, Todd Gautreau seems to have found a more instantly satisfying way of producing music. Arrival Lounge may not be a revolutionary record, and hardly compares with the likes of Boards Of Canada or Múm, but it has a lot of charm and personality, and proves to be worth listening to.