Autre Ne Veut - Age of Transparency

“Transparency is an impossibility,” says Autre Ne Veut’s Arthur Ashin in a statement about his new record. “It’s more about trying to be transparent and falling on your face in the process.” This proves a perfect statement to describe ‘Age of Transparency’, the second step from Autre Ne Veut in a trilogy exploring the difficulty of making personal connections in an impersonal time.

The modern age is something Ashin seems to find challenging – 2013’s ‘Anxiety’ made this explicitly clear: hopeful, gritty and disorientating all at the same time. And yet musically, he continues to rely heavily on contemporary production techniques to create sounds of the same contradictions.

There are, however, big thematic differences. Here, the search for pre-, unmarked truth, rather than mental stability, is the focus. The album cover reflects this – shifting the empty picture frame on Anxiety to a distorted sheet of glass – now held by robots rather than artisans.

But how is all this reflected in the record? Avant-garde R&B and electronica soundscapes continue to dominate, but are noticeably less accessible. Opener ‘On and On (reprise)’ is purposefully uncomfortable, its piano keys and backing track twisted within an inch of life – a metaphor for the fractured, obfuscating reality of human relationships.