Album of the Week: Guillaume & the Coutu Dumonts, ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’

Album of the Week: Guillaume & the Coutu Dumonts, ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’

14 May, 2010 | 4.27AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: album of the week, circus company, guillaume & the coutu dumonts

In just the past couple of years, Montreal’s Guillaume Coutu Dumont—better known as Guillaume & the Coutu Dumonts—has gone from relative obscurity to being recognized for having one of the most celebrated live sets in underground electronic dance music.

Just four years go, back in his native Quebec, the almost obsessively productive musician struggled to get labels to listen to his demos. Since his arrival in Berlin in early 2007, however, he’s branched out from the Montreal labels Mutek and Musique Risquée to release EPs on Hartchef, Oslo, Karat, and Circus Company, while the likes of Crosstown Rebels, Mothership, and Get Physical have lined up for remixes; Guillaume’s live set regularly takes him to first-tier clubs like Fabric and Arma 17, and this summer he’ll be playing for both Cocoon and Cadenza in Ibiza.

Guillaume’s new album, ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’, feels like a well-deserved victory lap. It takes the style that he’s perfected across his singles—a hyperkinetic, polyrhythmic fusion of sampled percussion, snippets of acoustic instrumentation, drum-machine patterns, and subtle synthesizer shading—far beyond the limits of the conventional dance floor. There’s plenty here for DJs—’Mindtrap’, ‘Can’t Have Everything’, ‘On the Lips’, ‘Helicopter’, and ‘Walking the Pattern’ are plenty powerful, with surging rhythms and purposeful basslines. (The latter three tracks are also available as extended versions.)

‘Helicoptere’

‘Walking the Pattern’

But those tracks are rounded out by more eccentric forays into slow-motion disco, downtempo, Afrobeat, and music still harder to define. What do you call ‘Intermede (Breaking the Fourth Wall)’, which feels like ambient dub, but charges ahead at upwards of 150 BPM?

‘Intermede (Breaking the Fourth Wall)’

“I can’t say that I have such a different way of working, just because I did a bunch of singles and I’ve only done three albums in my life,” says Guillaume of his approach. “So it’s not like I have a method I’ve been using for 25 years. But the mindframe between the single and the album are totally different. Especially for this one.”

He selected the songs on the album from a pool of around 100 tracks—sketches, rough drafts, live set components—to come up with a set that fit together into an indivisible whole. Indeed, for all its diversity, ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’ is a remarkably coherent album, held together by its rich acoustic palette and murky, ambivalent moods.

‘Can’t Have Everything’

He was inspired by classic concept albums, citing Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ as a formative example, “the perfect example of a concept album where the concept isn’t overwhelming. It leaves room for the music, and the music speaks for itself and expresses a concept, but a concept that’s so vague and abstract—but at the same time really coherent.”

“That’s what I tried to do with this,” he says. “Even the pacing of the tracks relates to the idea behind the album.” Beyond that, Guillaume prefers to keep mum about the specifics of his concept, to allow listeners to come up with their own interpretations. The cover, depicting a salaryman whose head explodes in a jumble of icons—airplanes, faces, horns and more oblique images—suggests a kind of cultural overload, a rupture of something that’s been bottled up. (The drawing, faintly reminiscent of Raymond Pettibon’s classic SST cover art, is by Guillaume’s twin brother, Gabriel Coutu-Dumont.) And the story continues across the sleeve of ‘Can’t Have Everything’, the album’s first single. Here we see the bored, besuited worker with a satellite dish sprouting from his ear, seemingly about to be flooded with an abstract red blob.

Maybe it’s that sense of overload—the surfeit of stimuli, options, possibilities, distractions that internet culture has made available—that informs Guillaume’s desire to give the album such a strong sense of unity.

“It’s not like there’s one type of album that’s good and one type that isn’t,” he stresses. “Someone could totally embrace the way that people absorb music now, and just make a collection of good tracks that you could rip. Someone could make an album like that and it would be fine. Who are we to judge the way other people work? But the attempt to create something more cohesive is what I wanted to do.”

‘On the Lips’

The title offers another clue, referring to the theatrical device whereby the imaginary line of the play is broken, drawing the audience into the fictional world, and vice versa. Appropriately, Guillaume stretched his methods into new areas with this album, working not just with samples of recorded music but also incorporating the contributions of an array of collaborators.

The members of dOP feature on ‘Can’t Have Everything’; Guillaume recorded in their studio last year, gathering voices and parts recorded on keyboards, horns, and other acoustic instruments and noisemakers. San Francisco’s Dave Aju lends his graveling speaking voice to ‘On the Lips’. Dynamike, a Zairian hip-hop vocalist now based in Switzerland, sings on the rollicking Afro-cumbia track ‘Radio Novela’. And further instrumental contributions come from a trio of jazz musicians that Guillaume has worked with for years.

‘Radio Novela’

Treating his fellow musicians’ input as a kind of sound bank, he re-edits their material in much the same way he would any piece of recorded music, collaging and massaging tones into wholes that seem to have their own center of gravity, held together by a force and a logic you can’t quite put your finger on.

‘Decenie’

Working with musicians and traditional instruments “suggests a space,” says Guillaume, “and that space is proper to acoustic music. And acoustic music, the acoustic field, is what’s often missing in house music.”

“Even before, when it was analog, with analog drum machines—the reverbs are artificial, it’s not really a room where it was recorded; it’s a big difference. You listen to super-cool classic house records, it sounds like a ton of bricks, it sounds really good. But there’s still [something missing]—that’s exactly why it was such a big deal at the time, because it was a big shift from acoustic music and production, and there was something specific in the sound that sounded like a machine. That’s why it worked! But now it’s cool to be able to mix that. It’s just opening your expressive palette. When you want a fat, dry 909 kick, you have that. But on top of that, it’s cool to have, like, a real acoustic guitar, that’s sampled in a room, and you mix a room full of drums on top of that. Both spaces are almost fighting together, but it creates a proper spatial surrounding.”

‘Unwelcome’

In the case of ‘Breaking the Fourth Wall’, that spatial surrounding plays out as if in four dimensions. And the more you listen, the more it just keeps expanding.

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