D'eon - Rhododendron Music CD

Montreal-based composer / producer Chris d'Eon's catalog encompasses everything from richly melodic keyboard music to glitched algorithmic abstractions to high-definition pop- and R&B-adjacent songwriting to holy post-classical minimalism to unabashed dance floor bangers. Hausu Mountain has the honor to release d'Eon's Rhododendron, his first album to appear on physical formats since 2015, following a swath of releases on seminal modern electronic label Hippos In Tanks in the early '10s. On Rhododendron, d'Eon highlights a palette of synthetic woodwinds, plucked string instruments, and choral voices, though he molds these tones into pieces with vastly different moods and levels of density and intensity. His ornate melodies in two- to four-part counterpoint trace out thrilling mini-narratives of electronic chamber music loaded with warm sentimentality and euphoric peaks, revealing how much emotion he can wring as a composer out of a small ensemble of digital instruments. In other moments, his orchestral tones are treated as fodder to scramble and reconfigure into rippling mosaics that morph into arrhythmic arcs and rapid-fire bursts of texture. When he dials everything back down to the bare minimum of one or two elements, as on the album centerpiece "Outskirts" which highlights a central voice akin to a harpsichord or hammered dulcimer, d'Eon's keyboard wizardry comes to the forefront as his nimble, heavily ornamented runs wind their way through expanding improvised helixes. While the elements that populate his tracks call attention to their own synthetic quality, d'Eon exploits their distinct textures, their crystal clarity, and their pure malleability to give life to the digital chamber music in his head. Even when his pieces veer towards more hectic stews of tones glitched together in unpredictable fashion, the notion of clarity remains central to d'Eon's work: he has confidently stacked his building blocks into baroque architectures without equivocation or wasted space.1) Intro2) Rhododendron pt. I3) Cobra4) Poplar5) Into the Clearing pt. I6) Into the Clearing pt. II7) Outskirts8) Rhododendron pt. II9) Through the Mangrove pt. I10) Through the Mangrove pt. II11) Into the Clearing pt. III12) Rhododendron pt. III