After decades of working at the margins of experimental electronic music, French composer Manon Anne Gillis returns with Eyry, her ninth solo album and a stunning testament to her unique approach to sound as a tactile, sensory experience. Released on Art Into Life as a limited edition of 300 vinyl copies (with download code), Eyry weaves together voice, breathing, words, and sounds using ingenious methodologies that have defined Gillis' practice since the 1980s.
Since her earliest works in the 1980s, Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems, pursuing an aesthetic that privileges feeling and immersion over conceptual understanding. Eyry continues this trajectory with ten pieces that transform spoken word and singing into blurred noise and irregular repetitions, plunging them into rhythm tracks to create new inner worlds. The album title itself – Eyry, a nest built high in a tree or on a cliff, typically by a bird of prey – suggests both elevation and isolation, a fitting metaphor for Gillis' singular artistic vision.
Where contemporary electronic music often seeks clarity and precision, Gillis works in the opposite direction, embracing blur, distortion, and the imperfections of rudimentary technology. Her voice becomes an instrument of transformation, stretched, repeated, and manipulated into textures that are simultaneously intimate and alien. Breath becomes rhythm, words become pure sound, and the boundaries between human and machine dissolve into a rich sonic fabric. Eyry builds on Gillis' decades-long exploration of voice manipulation and primitive electronics while pushing her work into new territories. The ten pieces function both as discrete compositions and as movements in a larger sonic architecture – each track a chamber in an elaborate structure, inviting the listener to move through spaces of contemplation, disquiet, and strange beauty. There is something ancient and primal in this music, yet it remains unmistakably contemporary, anticipating practices in ASMR, sound poetry, and experimental vocal technique.
