Bruit ≤ – The Age of Ephemerality | Album Review

It's hard to find artists like Bruit ≤. It will probably become even harder if certain trends and behaviours are to be expected to continue.

Back in April of 2021 when French atmospheric ensemble Bruit ≤ released their first full-length record, The Machine is Burning and Now Everyone Knows It Could Happen Again as the follow-up to their elegant two-track EP Monolith, the world remained in the grip of an epoch-defining health crisis. While self-serving free market champions fell over themselves to maximise profit margins amid the panic and uncertainty, Bruit ≤ raised more than a few eyebrows when they steadfastly refused to make their music available on any of the major streaming platforms. Citing the exploitation of art and the systematic devaluing of creativity, the band have no intention of backing down from their stance. Despite, or perhaps as a result of, their refusal to conform, Bruit ≤ have built a passionate and fully-engaged following and they’ve done so on their own terms.

Composed of two classically-trained musicians and two autodidacts, Bruit ≤ draw inspiration from a broad church of artists. Although they’ve certainly found favour among the post-rock crowd, their sound defies easy pigeonholing. The blending of studied musicality and self-taught experimentation is the backbone of this new release, The Age of Ephemerality. It’s an urgent treatise that wrestles with what it is to be alive in an ocean of digitised information. The album spans five tracks that function as movements with each one contorting and evolving, disintegrating and rebuilding.

The swell and pummel of album opener ‘Ephemeral’ gives way to a delicate acoustic interlude leading directly to towering lead single ‘Data’. With the disembodied voice of notionally-human technocrat Mark Zuckerberg punctuating swirling percussion and soaring strings, the track climbs skywards like vines reclaiming an abandoned data centre. This rousing sense of reclamation is underscored by the electronic motif that springs up towards the end of the track, bringing the digital and the analog into a beautiful unison.

The Age of Ephemerality is a transportative experience throughout and although it may be discomforting, the journey is one worth taking multiple times. Album closer ‘The Intoxication of Power’ is a profound experience in its own right. Delicately layered from a dirge-like opening, it blossoms and crystallises into one of the finest pieces of work the band have produced to date, and is perhaps the album’s crowning achievement.

For all of the exquisite detail and technical virtuosity to be found on The Age of Ephemerality, It’s fair to say that the track titles and audio samples may come across as on-the-nose, even reductive to an extent, but the sheer quality of the work and the earnestness of the messaging resoundingly win out over such minor quibbles.

This is not the work of artists resigned to a future of soulless algorithm-led servitude, but rather a sweeping reminder that life is more than the digital dust that swirls around us and obscures our sight. Ephemerality may be baked into the system, but we can create things that have permanence and actual value. As if to underline this message, the familiar Orwell quote that closes the record in which the author imagines the future as “a boot stamping on a human face forever” is not, in fact, the closing message. Rather, it continues with a bracing addendum “The moral is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”