On: Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night
DSA

Given that On is a duo comprised of Sylvain Chauveau and Steven Hess, one might expect Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night to be filled with pretty vignettes showcasing Chauveau's elegant piano playing and Hess's delicate drum shadings. An initial sign that it's not arrives with the discovery that piano duties are handled by Hess with Chauveau playing electric and prepared guitars; that the album is mixed by Helge Sten (aka Deathprod and Supersilent member) offers another clue to the album's sound.

After recording studio improvisations, the two musicians shipped three hours of tapes to Sten who then distilled the material into an hour-long album of seven pieces. The results—droning, windswept soundscapes adrift with cavernous rumbles, blurry ripples, and ghostly shimmer—resemble Deathprod's Morals and Dogma much more than they do Chauveau's Un autre décembre. Needless to say, recognizable traces of guitar, piano, and percussion are absent, having been abstracted into pure sound. Song titles alone (“Too Many Demons Still Haunt This Land,” “In the Forest of the Night”) suggest the album's spectral aura, a mood put on fullest display in the seventeen-minute, hymnal “The Lonesome Poetry of Mark Rothko.”

While the album is a more than credible example of abstract soundscaping and effectively presents another facet of Chauveau's musical personality (he's also a member of avant-rock band Arca and electronic duo Micro:mega), it's also music of lesser distinction than the piano work which has brought him justifiable acclaim (and, if taken on its own genre terms, is also considerably less haunting than Morals and Dogma). While an ever-increasing number of sound sculptors is capable of producing music of the kind heard on Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night, a much smaller number of artists seems capable of creating Chauveau's brand of affecting piano minimalism.

May 2005