"Things just weren't going very well that day." These are not the first but the last words of Blodder, an "ambient fiction" by Erik Belgum. Over 100 minutes, a story torturously unfolds in a way similar to Alain Robbe-Grillet's novels. The story line has been chopped in little pieces and is delivered bit by bit, at random (or so it seems). Basically, Blodder is the story of a robbery in a convenient store. Things go bad when a shot is fired and someone is killed. The work, in seven parts, goes back and forth between "monologues" where one voice narrates the story (although not linearly) and longer sections where multiple voices play characters in flashbacks. Segments of sentences are pasted together, voices interrupt one another, the whole text is deconstructed -- and the story with it, left for the listener to piece together, amounting to strange lines such as "Now, what they have in common is that they have both been hit by a dead person driving a police car/It was all romance going smoothly." Spatialization of the voices is interesting, interpretation is more than convincing, and the whole thing gives a sense of claustrophobia and hallucination. Hard to listen to in one sitting, Blodder is nonetheless better experienced with full concentration. Of course, this is not everyone's cup of tea and even spoken word aficionados will need encouragement in order to digest this album.
© François Couture /TiVo