Neon green boomerang shapes

Blanche Blanche Blanche - Songs Of
Night-People #133

It's hard to discuss Blanche Blanche Blanche without getting bogged down with finding all sorts of inventive ways to describe their sound. The male/female duo's music is constructed primarily from synthesizers. Speech-slurring, pupil-dilating, mind-fucking synthesizers. During opening track "Emily," the synths are so fucked and potent I began to imagine that, sorta like a synesthete, I could see the music and in this case, the sounds were neon green boomerang shapes inching across the room toward my face. Yes, synthesizers can be scary!

(And illegal. From Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again: "By the spring of 1982, electronic pop was so dominant that the Musicians Union made an attempt to limit the use of synthesizers. 'They seriously proposed the idea of rationing synthesizers, restricting them to certain recommended studios where they could be used to duplicate string parts,' says Ian Craig Marsh. 'Which sounds ludicrous, almost Stalin-like. But they wanted to protect the jobs of orchestras.'")

Here are other things I jotted down on a scratch pad when listening to Blanche Blanche Blanche:
• Synths call to mind dust motes dancing in beams of colored stage lights;
• Synths evoke the image of giant, silvery, fizzy scuba bubbles slowly rising to the surface of the ocean;
• Synths remind me of slow-motion footage of bullets impacting various surfaces.

On "Tragic Bios," it's like the Brattleboro, Vermont, duo just got their synths in the mail or at the flea market, and they're noodling around rather than constructing something with a definitive form and boundaries. On tracks like "Work Appears," the synthesizers aren't providing melody, but emphasizing space.

Sometimes the synths throb violently and bump the lyrics out of the way, or die off and provide breathing room for key phrases, or just tidal-wave over the vocals. What hardly changes is how the duo approaches singing: They sound largely detached and unsettling and monotone. (The synthesizers exhibit more emotion than the humans, like a machine-triumphs-over-man sort of thing. Except for on "White Tables," where they deliver this instantly-catchy chorus of "I could live in the dark / If I had my private light" and they draw out the word "private" in this playful, punchy manner.) The vocals sound like they're traveling through a long, long tube and the end has been placed near your ear. They're close, but faraway.

Mind-fucking, yes. Can't recommend this tape enough.