Brussels-based collage artist Roméo Poirier returns to Faitiche, the Berlin label run by Jan Jelinek, long a home for sound art that resists clear definition. He first released his ambient album Living Room there in 2022, followed by the split 7-inch Love/Hate with Jelinek’s alter ego The Exposures in 2023. Now comes Off The Record — a title to be taken quite literally. This is a record of what usually goes unheard: the opening voice on »Control Room« declaring, »Here we are at the controller. What are we doing first?« sets the tone for an album conceived as an adventurous journey through the history of the recording studio.
Fourteen collages weave together studio chatter, staff instructions, musician banter, mic checks and mistakes into a multilayered sonic suspense. Every cut is precise, arranged at times densely, at times with airy spaciousness, and distilled into a narrative form whose complexity captivates precisely because of its experimental nature. Twisted, stretched, remounted, slowed down or accelerated fragments from studio archives form a hypnotic dialogue that leads into a hallucinatory world.
Between these moments lie passages of haunting ambient music, such as in »Picobello« and »Ricochets«, where words become unnecessary. A gentle intoxication — entirely off the record.
Off The Record
