The Beautiful Schizophrenic is the pseudonym of sound designer Jorge Mantas, an artist who clearly has a bit of a fixation on Marcel Proust: all but two of the titles here are borrowed from lines of text from the author’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu – La Prisonniere. Of course it’s utterly preposterous to try and compare Proust’s monumental literary achievements to an album of drone-based microsound, but Mantas is keen to cite the links between love, melancholy and memory as a key factor in his own work, even being so bold as to pose the question: “Could this be a possible sound equivalent to the literary images of affection written by Proust in the early 20th century?” He then proceeds to answer the question with “Probably we’ll never know.” It’s hard to listen to this album without being haunted by the rather troubling sense that the composer is getting ideas above his station, but taken as a body of work on its own, detached from any delusions of grandeur, there are ample rewards to be reaped. The Basinski-style faded elegance of ‘un \u00c3\u00a9tourdissant r\u00c3\u00a9veil en musique’ is hard to resist, and the wonderful concr\u00c3\u00a8te cocktail ‘les oiseaux qui dorment en l’air’ is a real joy. Mantas even gets a little assistance from Cecile Schott – Colleen herself – on ‘La Lectrice’, a piece which (as the title suggests) consists of a reading, adding a more human edge to the bitcrushed orchestral passages that make up much of the disc. If you’re in search of some epic, romantic ambient electronics, you could do worse than lose some time listening to this. Lovely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Beautiful Schizophrenic is the pseudonym of sound designer Jorge Mantas, an artist who clearly has a bit of a fixation on Marcel Proust: all but two of the titles here are borrowed from lines of text from the author’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu – La Prisonniere. Of course it’s utterly preposterous to … <\/p>\n