Baleine, the second single to emerge from Tout Bleu’s haunting new album Otium, builds from sparse instrumental arrangements to a looping, loping synthesized folk part that is underpinned by a Steve Reich-esque top line. The album itself, released 10th December, is a singular vision made up of a dizzying array of things, from electric folk to Krautrock, glitch techno to dubbed-out postpunk, chamber rock to synthpop. It experiments with a pop sensibility, transmits its creators’ passionate social conscience with calm and charm alike, and finds the project evolving from the primary vision of Geneva based Simone Aubert to a functional band unit.
On the evidence of Otium, we’re catching Tout Bleu at a really exciting point in the band’s evolution. Released on Bongo Joe Records, which also has its base in Geneva and which, like Tout Bleu themselves, is at the heart of the experimental music scene in the city. Names on the label roster including Massicot, Hyperculte and Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp are directly linked to the TB family tree; others such as Cyril Cyril and AMAMI make the region weirder than the unsuspecting might suppose.
The shape of the musical underground in Switzerland, and Geneva especially, is vital to what Tout Bleu do. Cave12, the foremost Genevan venue for avant-garde music, is also crucial to the project having begun in the first place. Aubert cites the importance of Swiss experimental music veterans including Joke Lanz and Dave Phillips, artists who may be more sonically extreme but who, in a supportive and close-knit scene, still act as peers.
The flip side of this is the unmissable spectre of capitalist excess, hardly unique to Geneva but more glaring in this seat of international finance than in most cities. This only strengthens Aubert’s determination to keep existing in a way that pushes against such bloat – in Otium’s lyrics, which with a general economy of words call for we the people to remain courageous as the world spirals towards doom, and in the way Tout Bleu go about their business.
Tout Bleu may have taken a turn for the accessible with this latest release, but there’s no suggestion that Aubert craves success for its own sake – its title, a Latin word describing leisure time used for improving activities, is pointed in that respect.