Pitchfork

When Et Sans released their 2002 debut on the Locust label, the project was a duo consisting only of Montreal music vets Roger Tellier-Craig (Fly Pan Am, ex-Godspeed! You Black Emperor) and Alexander St-Onge (Shalabi Effect), and that album's airy, minimalist electronics were a welcome departure from the expansive orchestrations typically associated with the Constellation crowd.

Since that time the group has added Stephen De Oliviera, Fly Pan Am drummer Felix Morel, and G!YBE's Sophie Trudeau. Despite this additional instrumental heft, however, Et Sans have remained faithful to their stripped-down, primal pulse and Par Noussss Touss Les Trous De Vos Crânes (the loose translation of which involves something about holes in your cranium) presents the expanded lineup in full flutter.

Though Par Noussss Touss is divided into four extended tracks, it seems intended to be best digested as one continuous piece. Throughout the album Et Sans artfully combine electronic and acoustic instruments in a manner that disguises the origins of each individual sound, with snatches of indistinct vocals-- some cooed, some hollered-- cascading in and around the music's crackled landscape.

At various points these tracks do recall some of the more abstract junctures of Fly Pan Am's 2004 N'Ecoutez Pas album, but Et Sans in general prefer to take that group's Krautrock-inspired repetitions in a harsher, more experimental direction. Here they open things with a prolonged hush, as male and female voices exchange whispers over a sparse, barely-moving riverbed of hazy, distorted tape samples. But it's not long before things become considerably more agitated and the group's insistent keyboards gradually build into a sinister, Suicide-like pounding, the vocalists' virtually wordless exhalations take on an increasingly ominous urgency, and swarms of electronically-generated insects gather in numbers on every horizon.

In fact, things eventually become so unhinged that during the album's noisiest stretches it's only Morel's dogged drumbeat and the keyboard's steady one-fisted propulsion that keeps Et Sans' flywheel from spinning completely out of control. Squealing radio waves and tapes of briefly recognizable reeds, guitars, and strings meet in various stages of disintegration, while disembodied voices chant opaquely and an impressive monolithic drone grows strength beneath it all.

In their fully extended line-up Et Sans have gigged alongside the likes of Wolf Eyes and Black Dice, and the more raucous sections of Par Noussss match those acts in spirit if not always in execution. And now that Et Sans more than ever resembles a full-fledged band, it should prove gratifying to watch as they further hone their distinctive brand of quiet thunder.

"