IVM Trio - Explain Yourselves

The album title is a dare. IVM Trio, three artists from the French-Brussels experimental scene, have made a record full of abrupt turns, genre collisions and unresolved tensions, and they have named it after the question they refuse to answer. Sébastien Forrester, Mika Oki and Apulati Bien share a background in free improvisation, sparse atmospherics and what their label copy calls “rapturous club mutations,” and Explain Yourselves is less an album than a sustained demonstration of how unstable that combination can be. This is not a criticism.

“Triads” is a good introduction to their method. It opens with something close to a subway field recording, tunnels into a propulsive percussive beat, then collapses into a more chaotic space before it resolves. “Che Klows” begins as a kind of urban skirmish and slow-burns into psychedelia. Neither track announces what it’s about to do. Forrester’s percussion is the through-line across both, what Boomkat calls “wayward percussive discipline and feel for electronic dramaturgy,” which is accurate: he plays with the kind of physical intentionality that keeps things from slipping into mere texture, even when the surrounding music is fragmenting.

The three guests are well chosen and placed at the album’s structural peaks. Sara Persico, a sound artist from Naples, contributes soaring vocals to “Print,” the album’s longest track at just over six minutes, giving a trip-hop scaffold an unsettling quality that lingers. Grove, from Bristol’s punk-dancehall scene, delivers spoken word on “Beryl” around a story of lost love, direct and conversational against the electronic drift around it. The wildest move is bela’s death-metal growl on “This Heart Is Determined Not to Shatter,” a track barely two minutes long, which opens harsh and resolves into something close to tenderness. That progression, raw force into unexpected gentleness, is compressed almost to the point of whiplash, but it works.

The album’s closest antecedent might be the ECM-era experimental-improv tradition filtered through contemporary club electronics, the precision and spatial awareness of computer music alongside something genuinely physical. Mika Oki’s work as a visual artist is known for fog and mirrors and the instability of surfaces, and that sensibility is present throughout: you are rarely sure if what you’re hearing is a beginning, a middle or a collapse in progress.

At 36 minutes, Explain Yourselves is appropriately compact. It doesn’t outstay its welcome or pause to explain its logic. You are either on board or you are not, and either outcome seems fine with the people who made it.

Explain Yourselves is out now via Bandcamp.