Le Grand Salon’s latest EP release is a musically rich and challenging offering that equally possesses the qualities to soothe and disturb, threaten, and reaffirm, during its 25-minute runtime, in which it explores four distinct pieces of avant-garde piano compositions accompanied by atmospheric elements.
Recorded in Le Grand Salon’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania studio, L’Architechture de l’Impermenance is a bizzare release in the most delightful sense. Le Grand Salon is the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist and composer Pier-Luc Boivin who, inspired by the likes of avant-garde composers like Phillip Glass, manages to imbue each of his compositions with a sense of unsettled tension, courtesy of jittery droning and suspended, at times dissonant, musical passages that are passed on in the form of arrhythmic, free-time piano lines.
Demanding, the album is not in any way devoid of beauty. Quite the opposite, in fact, as the music’s prevalent, gentle textures are never abrasive or harsh. Boivin relies on a soft and pillowy grand piano or the nicest of phased Rhodes keyboard sounds, while the accompanying synths are purely effervescent and granular in quality, lending the sound of the compositions a very comforting effect that Boivin then proceeds to exploit with his experimental compositions.
Le Grand Salon’s intricate musical inspiration, which is the prime tone row, makes the sound atonal and alien, which Pier-Luc Boivin uses to express how he feels observing cities and their non-human constituents, contemplating the eventual decay of their man-made constructs. The deterioration of concrete, the rust, and the deconstruction were the elements that fueled Le Grand Salon’s musical imagination for writing this set of compositions, which he called “an inspiring creative challenge”, and from a listener’s perspective, I can easily confirm that the listening experience was also inspiring, creative, and challenging.