ARBORE is the collaborative project of French-born, Berlin-based artists Diane Barbé and Laure Boer, navigating the wide spectrum of electroacoustics, instrument building and radical improvisation.

“Genuinely loose-limbed and exquisitely zonked, Diane Barbé and Laure Boer’s ARBORE debut marries electroacoustic sound design to basement psych-folk, where homemade Vietnamese zither, flutes and whistles float around gloopy analog synths like some lost Nate Young plays Folkways record, or the deepest end of ssabæ, Oï les Ox and Catherine Ribeiro.

Instrument builder, field recordist and researcher Diane Barbé has already impressed with deeper-than-deep solo jaunts like last year’s ‘musiques tourbes’, an imaginary wetland cartography that was recorded at the INA-GRM studios, and as part of Somewhere Press supergroup FEU FOU alongside slowfoam, Mondlane and LOH. Multi-instrumentalist Laure Boer, meantime, has been developing her noise and folk-inspired improvisations for over a decade, releasing the deadly no-input mixer freakout ‘Chicanes’ in 2023, and finding her free jazz footing on February’s ‘FOUR LTTR WRDS’. The duo’s ARBORE project finds both artists taking a step back from their expected zones and connecting in real time.

On the first side’s long centrepiece ‘Chemin de montagne’, feral homemade flutes call out over collapsing percussive wrinkles and cryptic chimes. Scraped string improvisations shepherd us in the direction of trad folk, but then a fudgy, sub-heavy kick takes us into a half-speed dub. Boer’s Vietnamese zither is the star of the show, with Barbé’s xenharmonic whistles floating like bird calls over the top. When Aldous Huxley’s voice flutters and saturates over rickety drums and horn blasts on the ritualistic life march ‘Pas une trompette’, their psychedelic intentions are made clear.

On the flip, the duo warp a gentle French lullaby, singing to each other before the words stretch out into ‘Lost Highway’-level reality distortions. It sets the mood for the album’s eldritch second half which kicks into a different pace on the electro-plated ‘Petit crabe’, a drum machine & oscillator jam that gets snagged on its ruff edges. Then, on ‘La main sur la corde’, they gently pluck the zither, before the grand finale ‘Son Long’ stretches a vocal drone that pits Barbé and Boer’s voices against each other, picking out tonal variations and ferric ghost notes.

Barbé and Boer conduct a psychedelic ritual that transports us beyond the corporeal realm.” – Boomkat