Julien Ash and Philippe Neau Return With Les allées tourbillonnaires on Mahorka

Julien Ash and Philippe Neau released their first collaborative record earlier this year on Lotophagus Records. The second, Les allées tourbillonnaires, arrives on Mahorka, a label with a long history in uncompromising electronic music. The change of home is not incidental. Mahorka’s catalogue suits a record assembled from environmental noise and outdoor recordings rather than conventional instrumentation.

The source material is organic, gathered from green spaces and open ground, then pushed into less stable territory. Those timbres dissolve into resonating metallic and percussive interference, held in place by airy drones that keep the album’s atmosphere unsettled. “Croisements modulaires” shows how the duo handle clashing, echoing noise, burying it under microsounds and buzzing textures. “Flux entrant in la mineur” works differently, letting long, altered acoustic chords spread across a grey field of natural sound and reverberant motifs.

What keeps the record from becoming a technical exercise is its pacing. This is deconstructive music that resists harshness, moving through exploratory passages with something close to a meditative, eroded pulse. Both biographies feed into that restraint. Ash has worked for decades across avant-garde, post-industrial and semi-classical modes without much regard for category. Neau moves between sound and image, attentive to psychoacoustic effect and to sound as a painterly material.

Les allées tourbillonnaires is available on Mahorka.