Vital figure of radically expressive “trauma music”, Zoë Villerd aka Ronce returns with an unmissable album of uncomfortably captivating material that comes highly recommended if yr into Pharmakon, CoH plays Cosey, Perila.
Leading on from a ferocious debut album for The Death of Rave (‘Malignant’, early 2021), Ronce's second long player looks back over the shoulder to seven works that originally arose around the creation of ‘Lolita’, the frankly frightening 7” debut of male-gaze inverting dark ambient sound craft that introduced Villerd to the world at large in early 2020. For the uninitiated, that 7” cast a collage of NSFW samples from the “casting video” porn subgenre in a context of ASMR-styled icky tactility that turned the mirror on the listener. ‘Aquatics’ follows that precept with a collection that errs more to the negative space and implied suggestion of her first record than the outbursts of her album, deployed in a suppressed, concentrated style of needling intimacy with unflinching poise.
Out on her own in aesthetic, but channelling feelings felt by too many women, Ronce acts like a vent or psychopomp for “a collective scream” that most brutally translates “the constant surveillance, self disgust, rage, desire (or lack of)” directed at the female body. Joined by Dawn Records’ Hajj on its unmissable centrepiece of cracked classical motifs and searing sci-fi synths ‘Sauvage’, the album provides deeply uncomfortable yet crucial listening between the aleatoric inference of gasps and sallow chamber strokes in ‘The Devil Sleeps In My Stomach’, the petrifying shrieks of ‘Crushed’ and the numbness of ‘Bitter Almonds’, thru the sonic snuff of ‘Revenge Porn’ and a strikingly elegant conclusion, ‘Bois Vert’ verging on or re-framing Annea Lockwood levels of sound sensitivity or, say, the sensuality of Perila.
No doubt required listening, it’s not an easy going record - approach with due diligence, sympathy and caution.
words from Boomkat
credits
released September 15, 2021
RONCE - AQUATICS
(DAWN013)
100 limited copies
12inch
@itsronce
Produced by Zoë Villerd
Mastered at Studio Martyrs
Photo by Ronce
Design by Hajj
Dawn 2021
supported by 13 fans who also own “AQUATICS (DAWN013)”
It was a bit too much and samey by the end for me, but if you like dark atmospheres, if you are really interested in sound design or you enjoy the challenge of music that tries to wear you down, you should definitely check this record out.
I loved the echo-drenched drums and percussion and synths and hard to describe sounds on this, but it stays with the same sonic ideas for too long for me to enjoy to try to withstand the harsh wall of sounds minisculebarber