‘At the end, everything is noise or at worst, chatter..’
This line, found on The Age Of Ephemerality‘s Bandcamp page, colors in what’s important to BRUIT ≤ currently, or rather what isn’t important. It also conveniently and surely unintentionally references our own name, but that’s simply icing on the philosophical cake. Still, it calls out to me and makes me think – what is noise to us? Is ‘noise’ in this sense always negative? What ‘noise’ do we identify with and cling to in the greater cacophony?
The intent is as political as expected of BRUIT ≤. The quartet is unabashedly purposeful and outspoken with their themes and meanings which I think is to great benefit of their work. Outside of providing context for their dense instrumental post-rock, they wield their music like a flaming torch against the monstrous commodification of art and undervaluing of artists, opting to keep their music off of decent enough streaming services ran by terrible companies led by absolutely abhorrent people (mostly thinking of Spotify and Daniel Ek here), a respectable move that shows the values they hold. Below the surface though – hell, even just skimming the surface – even deeper meanings manifest.
The Age Of Ephemerality is BRUIT ≤‘s interrogation of the digital age, of people being turned into numbers and data, of the world we’re constantly told we’re (lucky to be) living in being turned upside down by reality. Because of this, the album has a synthetic feel to some of its elements. Not to say that the organic passion has been replaced with any sort of emulation or verisimilitude claiming to be the former, but it shows where the worship of technological advancement and Silicon Valley has gotten us. To show that, the music is grafted with an angularity and harsher noise. The trope of a building, boiling post-rock crescendo contorts from being a moment of intense serenity to representing the frying of our synapses from doomscrolling, beaming genocide and violence (of all kinds – physical, emotional, legal) into our brains everyday. And for what? The chance to see something we enjoy or that will motivate us, however ephemeral it is. This is our lives and has been for the last two-ish decades.
Sonically speaking, though because of all of the above, BRUIT ≤ really come off more tactile on The Age Of Ephemerality. The music grates more, the overall textures really being upped from The Machine is burning… which was generally smoother and more approachable. I mean, it turned me, a post-rock and modern classical agnostic, into a believer. This LP still has the four-piece setup you expect mixed with violin, cello, piano, but the synth and programming help differentiate. With songs like “Data” and “Progress / Regress”, that’s to be expected. The former has sound clips of Mark Zuckerberg purporting to know what we want out of the future when he’s really just speaking on his and his shareholders’ behalf. The track’s video explores the sterility of AI and search engines, and how you’ll only get the answers the tech and political elites want you to have. It is the absolute colonization of information, made possible by the gutting of our planet, actuated gleefully by men like Zuckerberg and companies like Meta. BRUIT ≤ stand diametrically opposed to it all, not only as artists, but as people.
Even still, the music wrapped around these themes burns brightly. I see it as expansive, not in the imperialistic or otherwise metastatic sense, but the communal one, where we one day rise above being turned into political enemies of our own state simply for denouncing children being dismembered and having their skulls collapsed in by American-made bombs, where one day each person in need is helped to the best of our abilities, where one day human art isn’t ransacked by soulless facsimiles that only value profit and ‘good enough’ results, where one day the sustained and power of noise like BRUIT ≤ make will remind only of our own collective and celebratory singing and not an LRAD used to deafen those that speak out against perpetual fascism.
Of course I went into BRUIT ≤‘s new album with expectations – their last one was one of my favorites of 2021. The greater majesty from The Machine is burning… is gone – for me, this is a simple expiry of my honeymoon period with the band, but for them, I feel this is absolutely intentional. The Age Of Ephemerality is a personal story in the sense that we should all feel BRUIT ≤‘s warnings and realizations deep within ourselves. Honestly, if it took until now to alarm you… I don’t know, I understand we all learn and grow at different paces, but holy shit, things have been bad for decades and have only gotten progressively worse with any progress able to be erased in days if not hours. I hate everything this album is about, but I love that BRUIT ≤ are talking about it in their own way.
I think of BRUIT ≤ the same way I think of video game auteur Hideo Kojima (who I generally love) and particularly his work on Death Stranding. For as much as he’s called a pretentious hack with overwrought concepts and sloppy execution, it’s undeniable the way in which he conveys something like community and connection between all the lines of technobabble delivered by ridiculously-named characters (modeled meticulously after their actors’ real-life appearances of course). Delivery is just as important as the message and while we’ll all have different tolerances and preferences in how we get to the point, I think it’s worth investing time into seeing how things play out in different mediums by different people with different ways to say things. In that sense, The Age Of Ephemerality may be a bit on the nose with how it conveys and interprets our world, but it’s no less correct or artful. Speaking of, the album ends with this popular and expanded upon George Orwell quote, or rather passage from his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and despite its overuse, it’s just as good – though likely better – a note to go out on than anything I could personally write:
‘There will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. This is the direction the world is going in at the present time. There will be the intoxication of power. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The moral is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.’
Band photo by Arnaud Payen
