Review: Duane Pitre - Bayou Electric

At the base of Bayou Electric is a field recording that Pitre made in Louisiana back in August 2010. It’s unmistakably the sound of the night; the soundscape of wildlife filling the empty spaces where light and landscape used to be, with insects purring and chirping like water flow and electric fences. There’s a sense of rural, open space as the chorus fills up the sky. No doubt the view during the day extends for miles on all sides, spilling down the sides of lush hills and rising upward to touch the clouds. Instead of carving up this recording and dispersing it amongst other instrumentation, Pitre keeps it intact. The landscape exists as a whole, and the instruments sprout upon it like plant life. Violins and organs linger like late evening fog, spreading into eachother with unconscious movement, and with the same grace and ecological cohesion that his environment exists and interacts, Pitre embeds a music that swerves and sways as the wind and weather dictate.

The land upon which the field recording was made has been in the Pitre family for almost a century. With this in mind, the instruments stack upon eachother like the sediment of ancestry: flickering strings perched upon warm drones, which in turn ride the undulating layer of bass frequency. History hovers unseen. The atmosphere never deviates from warmth and balance, and the respiring stillness offers a perfect bed for the Pitre family history to settle upon. The fog sidles serenely into the past and the future, rich in the homeliness that has been and twinkling curiosity with thoughts of the years to come.