Jean-Sebastien Héry, the seriously talented French guitarist who put together last year’s best rock band, AIS (The Amazing Insurance Salesmen – winners of the Beijing and China rounds of last year’s Global Battle of the Bands), has lately been venturing into ‘experimental folk’ territory. That is to say, he’s using digital loop effects to produce ‘multi-tracked’ live performances. This has been somewhat of an overplayed fad among the avant garde set for the past couple of years – with Xiao He and Li Tieqiao, in particular, going way overboard on the idea. Jean-Seb deploys these gizmos with rather more taste and restraint, but it still – for me – takes away something of the verve and spontaneity of a conventional one-instrument-at-a-time performance.
Interesting stuff, though – if you want to give it a try, you can listen to it for free here and here (along with the rest of his astonishingly diverse 10-year catalogue of music).
1 comment:
The trouble with Jean-Seb is that he has musical ADD. His creativity is so diverse that he can never focus on any one thing for any length of time. AIS, for example, appears to be now demised, after less than two years (and their stuff was a melange of styles that defied ready pigeonholing).
His output over the last ten years or so strays from conventional folk into unconventional folk (with traditional Chinese flavours) and on into jazz, and blues-rock, and orchestral 'soundtrack' compositions... and now getting dangerously close to electronica with some of this new stuff.
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