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Roméo Poirier

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Roméo Poirier, “Off The Record” (Faitiche, 2025)

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This fourth solo album from the reliably fascinating French collage artist is billed as “an amusing romp through the discarded history of recording studios.” That claim probably wildly oversells this album’s comedy value, but Off The Record is definitely unusually playful and entertaining for a sound art album. It is also quite an immersive, unexpectedly beautiful, and occasionally even haunting album that impressively continues Poirier’s hot streak. Stylistically, most of the pieces resemble the warm, skipping loop ambiance of classic Oval, but the unpredictable and overlapping samples of studio chatter, sound checks, and false starts adds quite a lot of mystery and depth to that vision.

Much like its predecessor Living Room (assembled from samples of his father’s music), Off The Record feels like both a loving homage and an inventive deconstruction/détournement. This is most evident on “Steve A.” (a thirty second collage of Steve Albini saying the word “studio”) and “The List.” In the latter, an array of Poirier’s friends and peers (Jake Muir, Andrew Pekler, etc.) list a series of iconic and influential studios (INA GRM, Black Ark, etc.) over a sensuously pulsing ambient dream fog. It is one of the album’s most beautiful pieces despite the music remaining relatively understated and unchanging, as the space between the various voices gradually decreases until they overlap in a hallucinatory jumble. Apparently Poirier’s inspiration was partially borrowed from the Accumulation style associated with French artist Arman (and others) in which unaltered, mundane items are combined into an assemblage. The artistry lies primarily in the curation and placement of the materials and Poirier shows a real gift for that here, as Off The Record’s best moments attain an elegantly woven spell of sublime beauty from a host of forgotten, discarded, silly, and otherwise meaningless studio moments.  

To his credit, Poirier finds an impressively ingenious array of compelling ways to recontextualize his studio detritus throughout the album, playfully dabbling in everything from dub to exotica to soul (and tossing in some well-placed amusing samples along the way as well). While the first two pieces function primarily as a gently deepening immersion into Poirier’s vision, things soon settle into a nearly unbroken run of highlights starting with the album’s third piece (“Langsam”). Some pieces are more musically substantial than others, but they all tend to follow a similar trajectory in which studio chatter on a specific theme is gradually transformed into something unexpected and compelling. In “One Two One Two” for example, Poirier unleashes a host of eclectic clips of various engineers and artists endlessly counting off, but the final moment blossoms into a sensuous ambient haze with finger snaps and a trumpet hook. Elsewhere, “Ssttuuddiiooo” transforms a chopped and skipping loop of the word “studio” into an unexpectedly soulful and sexy groove that suggests a hypnagogic Madlib deconstruction. “Silencio” is similarly musical and even more substantial, as a dubby bass throb anchors a sensuous and dream-like voyage through a swirl of voices, subtle electric piano, and string flourishes.

The overall effect is akin to a series of clever and amusing magic tricks, as it is always a delight to hear the seemingly disjointed parade of aborted takes, sound checks, dialogue snippets, and mishaps improbably blossom into something wonderful (sometimes with a delightful final reveal to boot). For example, “Snare Drum Mic” is a languorous fantasia of lush strings, Hawaiian-sounding lap steel, and snatches of singing that ends with guy explaining (and then exasperatedly re-explaining) that he accidentally banged into the snare drum mic. 

Aside from the charming premise, flashes of humor, and ingenious execution, I was unexpectedly impressed with the general vibe of the album, as the juxtaposition of orchestral samples, snatches of jazz, and bleary ambient synths feels like a hallucinatory and impressionistic taste of mid-20th century Hollywood grandeur. That element really makes this album feel like an immersive experience much greater than the sum of its parts. I also love how the endless cavalcade of interruptions and false starts give the album a mischievously elusive feel that lies somewhere between an existentialist comedy and a series of flickering mirages. Neat trick. My only caveat with Off The Record is that it leans more heavily towards art than ambient beauty, so curious listeners may want to give Hotel Nota or Living Room a spin before delving into this more minimal and conceptual detour. 

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Roméo Poirier, “Living Room” (Faitiche, 2023)

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This third album from former lifeguard/Brussels-based electronic composer Poirier may very well be the most beautiful distillation of his gently psychotropic strain of loop-driven, summery, surf-side electronica to date. The same could have been said of 2020’s Hotel Nota, of course, but Poirier’s work genuinely seems to become more fascinating with each fresh album (and each new detail that I read about his inspirations). Unsurprisingly, Living Room does not dramatically depart from the “Jan Jelinek inspecting a coral reef” aesthetic first debuted on 2016’s Plage Arri​è​re, but it feels like Poirier’s sundappled, beach-friendly vision of languorously flickering loops is increasingly headed deeper into more exotica-inspired territory, which is almost always a good move in my book. Aside from that continuing stylistic evolution, Living Room is also significant for being the first Poirier album to feature another one of his long-standing fascinations: the innate musicality of the human voice (particularly when de-coupled from language and meaning). Unsurprisingly, Poirier incorporates that new feature in a characteristically compelling and poignant way, as the album is peppered with chopped, screwed, and decontextualized fragments from his musician father’s sample collection. The result is not quite “pop,” yet it gets surprisingly close to it at times and those ephemeral glimpses of human warmth suit Poirier’s swaying and sublime tropical dream beautifully.

The opening “Statuario” is a reasonably representative introduction to the album’s multifarious delights, though its lazily sensuous bass pulse creeps more into a loscil-esque strain of aquatic-sounding dub techno than most of the other pieces. Aside from that, however, “Statuario” is a moonlit fantasia of chirping psychotropic frogs, submerged and enigmatic orchestral fragments, blurred and hissing textures, and sophisticated harmonies. That latter bit is a surprisingly crucial part of the album, as Poirier’s chord progressions and melodies rarely feel conventional–there are almost always passing shadows of dissonance and hints of uneasy harmonies gnawing at the edges of Poirier’s Endless Summer-esque bliss. That element makes Living Room a more complex and mysterious experience than I expected, but Poirier displays an impressive lightness of touch with his more jazz-inspired tendencies. I am tempted to describe the baseline aesthetic of Living Room as “bathtub-recorded Endless Summer” meets “loscil doing a DJ set at a tiki bar,” which admittedly sounds very appealing, but there are too many interesting twists throughout the album for that glib assessment to feel right. There are obviously other artists who have made killer recordings in this vein before Poirier, but that does not prevent Living Room from rivaling those earlier classics and Poirier brings an especially fresh and innovative aesthetic to the table.

While I am quite fond of the aforementioned “Statuario,” there are a number of highlights deeper into the album that rival or surpass that opening statement. The first such highlight is stammering and gently convulsing “Bespoke,” which almost feels like a sexy but deconstructed R&B song struggling to remain in focus as dimensional barriers dissolve, time erratically stretches and condenses, and hallucinatory electronics flicker and smear in the periphery. Soon after, the warmly flickering and undulating “Anna” delves even deeper into sultry R&B territory to similarly great effect (I especially love the slippery and sensuous “hook” at its heart). The final two pieces on the album are instant classics as well. “Les grandes lignes” feels like a languorously pulsing locked groove burrowing into a psychotropic jungle of hissing and shivering insectoid sibilance, while the closing “Superstudio” feels like a Beach Boys classic a la “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” or “Good Vibrations” aggressively deconstructed into a single stuttering moment of summer bliss immortalized in suspended animation forever. As for the remaining pieces, the most damning critique I can muster is that some of them are too brief or feel like an extremely promising foundation for something more fleshed out. Mathematically, that means that roughly a third of this album touches greatness, but it is crucial to note that this is not the sort of album that I normally go into expecting to find a bunch of hot singles. The fact that they exist and that there are so many of them is basically icing on the cake, as Living Room is an immersive, beautifully textured, and masterfully crafted album from start to finish.

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