Portrait-Robot
Label: Tricatel/Hit Thing
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Portrait-Robot
There are moments on Portrait-Robot near the end of “Ma Boîte à Musique,” for example, or at the beginning of one of this deluxe edition’s bonus tracks, “Colour Wheel” that find French electronicist Bertrand Burgalat locking into a beat-centric Euro-funk that could have been nicked from Fatboy Slim or Beck. Those moments evoke a temporal vertigo, as the contemporary sounds they reference are utterly at odds with the vintage tonalities and structure that define the rest of this album. And then you realize that you’re not listening to a document recorded in the late ’70s or early ’80s by a prescient knob-twiddler: Portrait-Robot was recorded late last year, and Burgalat is no back-of-the-crate discovery. A label owner, producer, composer, film scorer and, obviously, musician of reputation, Burgalat is possibly the only artist on the planet to have worked with both Einstürzende Neubauten and Pizzicato Five. This peculiar diversity shows through on this disc, which somehow manages to merge creepy introspection with goofy futurism.
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2005.