BRUIT ≤
The Age of Ephemerality
PELAGIC
As we careen through the 21st century, it’s becoming increasingly evident that we, as a culture, have run out of ideas. Fashion began folding in on itself in the early 2000s and has continued to do so at such a rapid pace that it’s impossible to tell whether someone’s out of line with what’s chic or whether they’re making a concerted effort to bring it back; cell phone technology appears to be regressing out of some misguided embrace of nostalgia for its clunky beginnings; the guy who ruined Thanksgiving dinner for all of America has moved onto creating a Beta version of Facebook’s alternate reality wherein everything’s roughly the same, only it sucks way, way worse. His needly voice reminding us that “this is the future you want to see” during Meta’s 2021 SOTU address as he unveiled his ugly vision for a virtual reality of capitalist Miis is among the most condemning statements on our society to date.
Perhaps it’s some variant on the “at least we’ll get some good music out of this” trope that’s accompanied every overtly evil presidential administration of my lifetime that France’s BRUIT ≤ have mastered the art of swallowing up all of this data and regurgitating it as something nearly as chilling as an AI deepfake of Zuckerberg’s soulless facial features. But they didn’t rob creative individuals of their work to craft their new post-metal opus The Age of Ephemerality—in fact, their mission statement as a band is quite the opposite, given their staunch refusal to help another tech oligarch line his pockets with the vast majority of the album’s potential streaming royalties. There are no vocals within this fully instrumental datascape aside from a few samples, including the aforequoted snippet of Zuck’s speech, which is backed by colossal post-rock sounds that lyriclessly address the unthinkable progress and regression of our post-internet age, as well as the beauty and harm that the world has undergone since we’ve begun logging on.
It would be easy to classify BRUIT ≤ as the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor if it weren’t for the fact that the Toulouse quartet address internet brain rot through a sonic language that seems to incorporate that condition, whereas GY!BE more so integrates the physical destruction of our world through acts of genocidal violence into their music (I would also argue that GY!BE are the new GY!BE). With elements of drone and modern-classical sound in the mix, the equally instrumental (and equally militant) Divide and Dissolve also come to mind, though curiously, Age of Ephemerality came together in the wake of the band serving as Anthony Gonzalez’s backing musicians as he recently attempted to revive M83’s early shoegaze sound in a live setting.
Recorded in mountains and churches with live instrumentation (including a 19th century church organ and a guitar octet featuring Slift’s Jean Fossat, among other avant-metal figures), BRUIT ≤ aim to remind the listener that this music is entirely rooted in a physical space that’s in direct opposition to the abstract digital realm accessible behind the icon for the $12-a-month streaming trough on your phone. The emotions behind both the positive and negative aspects of our world reflected in these songs—most succinctly expressed in the inquisitive ambient sounds of “Progress / Regress” giving way to pure brutality—are undeniably familiar to our everyday lives, with The Age of Ephemerality ultimately basking in the wonders of offline spaces as much as it rages against the algorithm.
