about the record

Off The Record is an amusing romp through the discarded history of recording studios. It contains fourteen miniatures based on accidental recordings of studio talk, revealing things that were never meant for the public. We hear instructions from studio staff, scraps of conversation between musicians, or microphones being adjusted, as well as false notes and false starts. Everyone stops. Start again: 1, 2, 3, 4!

Poirier’s approach recalls Accumulation, an art form practiced by Arman, Jean Tinguely, and Daniel Spoerri, which involved piling up everyday items into assemblages. The objects themselves often remained unaltered, the artistic gesture consisting of the careful curation of a distinctive selection. Poirier’s audio collages explore similar terrain. The fourteen pieces on Off The Record combine more than a thousand found sounds from studio archives into complex miniatures. The audio content of these outtakes is twisted, stretched, cut, reassembled, slowed down, and accelerated. Voices cut into a microgroove from a very old recording intertwine with digital voices gleaned from YouTube, all of them in dialogue, engaging the listener with the impression of being part of a new music group.

Using the mundane routine of setting up before the actual recording gets underway, the album tells a universal story about working in a recording studio. It manages something few achieve, transforming specialist knowledge into a narrative whose beauty goes far beyond its immediate subject. It speaks to everyone because the story is told in a musical language that is open and accessible, evoking magical images reminiscent of Oz, a world consisting less of events than of camp hallucinations, captured in grainy black-and-white photographs. En passant, Poirier shows us how the notion of material accumulation can produce great art.