Renonce
Nuisance Sonore
Negative Gain/Verboden
Montreal’s Renonce is the industrial project of Montreal-based producer Frédéric Nogarède, and is rooted his love of extreme music. In a brief conversation with Le Canal Auditif regarding his new LP, Nogarède cited his tinnitus as one of the chief inspirations for the record, and connects it to its title Nuisance Sonore, or “noise nuisance”, which should give you an idea of the general texture of the album. What may be surprising is that despite its grittiness, the LP is made up of some very focused and sparse electro-industrial, firmly planted in Nogarède’s own deliberately lo-fi aesthetics.
A track like “Plus des Vacarmes” (“No more Racket”) is, despite its title, a pretty good primer on what Renonce is all about; Nogarède yowls and screeches his vocals over manic drum programming, his overdriven kicks and trash can snares buffetted and reinforced by rapid-fire synths that coalesce into drones for the songs massive sounding breakdowns. Yeah, it’s noisy as all get out and the sound design (abetted by producer Annie-Claude Deschênes of indie punk act Duchess Says and a mix from Toronto’s similarly bellicose Odonis Odonis) is deliberately opaque, but that only adds to the power of these songs: opener “Fracasse” rams crushed percussion straight through the clouds of smoky reverb, leaving space for its pads and garotte-wire synthlines to spiral through the stereo spectrum in its wake.
The record is more than just an eight track endurance test though, as Renonce knows when and where to slow things and ratchet up the tension. “Scie Circulaire” (which naturally uses a sample of an actual circular saw) goes the route of a halftime tempo, the drum hits supporting its looping bass and layers of vocal distortion, slowly increasing the pressure until its conclusion, which still leaves you feeling disquieted more than relieved. “En Silence” strips things down to just bass and a simple kick-snare pattern to provide the echoing vocals room to sound, only to have a wave of static wash over it all, increasing its desperation. Hell, it’s no less noisy but there’s a genuinely great melody at the heart of “Mauvais Perdant”, with the voice of Montreal synthpunk staple Laura Krieg taking center stage, powerful enough to rise above the din and ruckus, emphasizing the song behind all the clamour.
There’s a solid history of this kind of noisy version of electro-industrial, with tracks like closer “Anorexie” evoking early Gridlock just as much as it does contemporary noisy electronic acts like Hide or classics from the likes of Portion Control. Shaped by by found sound samples that speak to his home city, and a love for grind and death metal, Renonce is crashing his way into that tradition, with Nuisance Sonore as a battering ram. Recommended.
