Send "Ensemble " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Ensemble is the current nom de plume of Olivier Alary, French-born, Montreal-based composer. You may recognize his name as one of a few contributors to Björk's Medulla, where he served as both a co-writer and remix artist. Or, you might have heard the score he provided for 2009's Last Train Home, a well-received Chinese film about a family of peasants journeying to be reunited. Both are good contextual examples when approaching Alary's work as Ensemble, a project in which he marries elements of film score and classical music to more experimental avenues. It's a note he hits early in Excerpts, his latest. As "Opening" opens, Alary arranges for what feel like great orchestral sighs and groans, violins that dance above a layer of low-end that recalls the Montreal post-rock of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. That dichotomy between flight and discord makes for music whose axis is constantly being flipped, whose focal point is always shifting. It's disorienting listening of a very specific type.It's often that music so fit for film suffers without a visual compliment. That's not the case with Excerpts. Alary's work here holds up well on its own, though it's not a record with a whole lot of replay value. Take for instance the many stages of "Things I Forget", a piece that stops to change direction several times within its own five-minute running time. "They come, they go, things I collect," sings Darcy Conroy, whose vocals appear often here, both in French and English. "Gathered en masse, spilled from the drawers, estimating the past." It's an image echoed both by Excerpts' cluttered cover art as well as the overarching concept Alary threads throughout the record. As he and Conroy conclude warring spoken word passages at this song's jarring midpoint, it finds a new melodic thread to carry it home, the very same that Alary recycles for the title track's bedrock in the album's second half....full text |
| Musicomh |
| Despite the confusing moniker, Ensemble is the work of one man, Olivier Alary. Alary keeps good company, with Lou Barlow and Cat Power lending their vocals to his self titled debut, while Bj�rk enlisted his writing skills for her album Medulla. This time he's taken to the mic himself, and guest vocals come courtesy of long-term collaborator Darcy Conroy. Less high profile then, but his trademark blissed-out Franco-pop doesn't suffer for it. The names Matthew Herbert and Serge Gainsbourg are bandied around him but Ensemble's latest effort has more than a hint of Stereolab about it. A bilingual record, both singers flit between French and English, something French-born Alary puts down to his living in Montreal. But it's not just the lyrics that sing in different languages; Excerpts is a beautifully eccentric album with bold orchestral sounds slapped over an ever-present electric hum. A wall of sound opens the record before Things I Forget announces the album's start. Alary clearly believes there's no sense in saving the best til last; it's unmistakably an album opener, a dawn song, but its freshness, coupled with a blend of haunting electronica and an old fashioned waltz, make it stand out. Pizzicato strings flutter around Conroy's seductive, breathy voice, an effect that's only matched a couple of times across the rest of the album....full text |
| Bbc |
| Montreal-based Olivier Alary has friends in high places. His eponymous 2006 album featured contributions from Cat Power and Lou Barlow and, as well as working with Björk on a track for 2004’s Medulla and remixing two of her songs, he’s also composed music for installations at museums and galleries like the V&A and the Centre Pompidou. Listening to Excerpts it’s not hard to hear why: he has an ear for the experimental, but he’s not afraid of sweetening the pill with a haunting melody or two. Alary’s stated aim was to explore "idealised era(s) in which we have never lived" and "beautiful places we’ve never been", so Excerpts is flush with an air of melancholic nostalgia. The classical influences evident in his string arrangements and the employment of old fashioned musical forms – a number of songs are in waltz time, rarely popular in contemporary pop music – help Alary conjure up a dream world in which past and present collide. And, though his own vocals are gently charming, he’s helped at times by the gentle tones of Darcy Conroy, whose wistful, feminine delivery – like a mildly sedated Lætitia Sadier – sits as comfortably amongst the strings of Things I Forget as it does amidst the short field recording of November 22nd, where he treats the tape so that it sounds as though it has been recovered from a dusty attic after years of neglect, much like an old, faded snapshot. Furthermore, his decision to tackle some songs in French, a result of his French Canadian roots, adds a further exotic romance to the mix: Les Saisons Viennent has hints of Francoise Hardy’s early 1970s albums, while Envies d’Avalanches recalls Yann Tiersen, if his latter more upbeat work rather than his better-known Amélie and Good Bye Lenin! soundtracks. Not that this is exclusively a serene trip down Memory Lane: on En Attendant L’Orage Alary breaks out the distortion pedal, smothering his otherwise gentle French chanson in squalls of noise, while Mirages collapses towards its end into the sound of a distant orchestra tuning up. But overall Excerpts is an evocative, sophisticated and charming record, awash with imaginative atmospheres, that looks back to the past for inspiration without ever wallowing in sentiment....full text |
Ensemble lyrics
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