q

For what became Poire_Z's last performance, the quartet invited an unlikely guest: British vocalist Phil Minton. The singer's highly idiosyncratic vocal experiments could be seen as the antithesis of Poire_Z's makeshift electronic spitter-spatter, but on the contrary, they complete each other rather well. Minton's snore-like drones, throaty overtones, and scrambled shortwave-esque mumbles integrate fully into Voice Crack's chirping cracked everyday electronics, Günter Müller's endless electronic treatments of minute percussive gestures and prerecorded sounds on iPod/MDs, and eRikm's relentless noise sculpting. Recorded live at the Musique Action festival in May 2002 (by François Dietz, one of the best engineers there is for this kind of extreme music), the set consists of one 39-minute piece, followed by a short encore. Someone accustomed to Poire_Z's brand of electro-acoustic improvisation but unaware of Minton's presence on this recording could listen to Q for a good 15 minutes before noticing the extra voice; right from the start, the vocalist finds a place within the group sound to seditiously work his magic, grunting and mumbling away. When he pulls out his trademark Donald Duck vocalizations in the very last minutes of the long piece, he sounds like one of eRikm's turntable moves! "W oder Q" contains a few very average moments, but the piece develops following a nice curve and delivers a gripping climax. "Q oder Z," the encore, caps things off with a quiet five minutes during which Minton is featured more prominently. As swansongs go, this album sees Poire_Z leaving the stage in style. ~ François Couture, Rovi