La Roche's Liye Liye is a compelling statement on life and sense of place from the Congolese DJ and producer, as well as a demonstration of the natural subversion of the interconnectedness of our lives.
Affiliated with the Fulu Miziki collective, La Roche's debut LP captures the excess and strange tranquility of his home through the patching in of street noise and common domestic ephemera into the aggressive pull of a 909 tempered seam of propulsion. Unzip that seem and you will find a lot that is familiar, such as reflective electro chords and quivering crystalline resonances, elements common to the scènes à faire of deep house.
But this recognition also extends to sounds of the city and home, artifacts identifiable to anyone living in the modern world- intrusive car horns and chiding alarm clocks, as well as signs of conflict and disorder in the form of a symphony of gunshot.
Sound is always around us, what makes it something else is only a matter of whether or not we accept its potential and imbue it with a special significance.
The way in which La Roche places all of the elements presented on Liye Liye into harmony with each other- linking their loops and pulling them along together as if by the turn of a bicycle gear- is something outside of the ordinary, but inextricably linked to it as well. The evocative sequencing of beats and interlacing with synthesizer grooves causes the recognizable to become somewhat mystified, both in source and meaning.
The background rushes to the foreground, and in the resulting reorientation, a new sense of environmental awareness takes precedence. In this new structure, music is not made but felt, and that feeling is everywhere.
The rhythm of life is often considered separate from the rhythm of the club, but La Roche shows them to be part of one continuum- the sounds of life and work become tributaries to a concrete concerto, and the music pumping from a sound system below street level, becomes the electrical conduction system managing the pulse of a kind of spiritual irrigation. Underground meets overground, life bleeding into play.
The intrusions of the everyday into a space of imagination would seem to point to the alienation that couches so much of modern living, but in La Roche's hands, it feels like a total synthesis, a metabolization of the ordinary to produce dreams, while forcing dreams to manifest in the realm of the provincial.
Is Liye Liye the proverbial siren of the detournement? You'll have to plug in to find out.
