1991, Summer, Huntington Garage Fire
Cellist Leila Bordreuil infuses walls of noise with a sense of deep melancholia
I took a brief glance to the side. The middle-aged woman in the seat next to me was plugging her ears with her fingers, her face contorted in a mix of horror and disgust.
On stage, Leila Bordreuil had been coaxing devilish screeching tones from her cello for 20 minutes. After a slow decrescendo, she had gone back to harsh noise attacks nearing the end of her set.
Parts of the audience seemed disturbed by her half-hour performance. Even though A L’Arme! was billed as an experimental music festival, they hadn’t come to actually challenge their listening habits.
The programmers, on the other hand, provided a strong statement by inviting her to open Radialsystem’s stage on Thursday night.
Leila Bordreuil clearly wasn’t interested in pleasing the crowd.
I’d previously seen the French-American cellist play with Laurel Halo at Atonal festival in October 2023, and then again, in May 2024, at Berlin’s Volksbühne.
Especially at that last concert, the two musicians performed a stunning version of Halo’s Atlas, an eerie chamber jazz album based on drones and dissonance.
Halo was seated at a grand piano, her back turned towards the audience. Bordreuil faced the listeners on a chair at the front of the stage.
The sharply dressed women were floating in a sea of smoke, in front of a sculpture of long, black, shimmering curtains mirroring the dramatic tides of the music.
It was gorgeous and strange, but Bordreuil’s polarizing performance at A L’Arme! was something entirely different.
She built a punishing wall of noise through her instrument’s interaction with the amplifiers, adding electronic effects in real time.
The middle-aged woman next to me was visibly relieved when the concert came to an end. Others were happy, even enthusiastic, crying out joyfully. The applause felt longer than usual.
A few weeks later, in September 2024, Bordreuil released her most recent album 1991, Summer, Huntington Garage Fire.
A collection of one long live recording and six shorter studio tracks, the cassette tape was released by Aaron Dilloway’s label Hanson Records.
Dilloway, co-founder of trailblazing noise rock band Wolf Eyes and a renowned experimental musician in his own right, tells the story behind the recording:
"The A-side and title track of this cassette is a live document of one the best live concerts I've seen/heard in the past few years. It was recorded during a house party cookout in Leila’s backyard that I was lucky enough to attend. She played along to a video recording her partner’s family had made for their insurance after a garage fire back in 1991.
The audio of the video was played through the PA and Leila slowly builds her electronics and cello into a psychotic inferno of wild noise and feedback. At the zenith of the piece it’s like if PAN SONIC (playing at their most raw) decided to play a set with live squealing pigs. It’s insane, raw, disturbing and cleansing. The remaining pieces are lush and haunting tracks made using the audio of the VHS as source material."
Today’s experimental music can often feel tame and polite. Not this one.
The New York Times once described Bordreuil’s music as “steadily scathing”, “favoring long and corrosive atonalities”.
On the title track, which takes up most of the tape’s A-side, she produces a massive wall of noise, drones and feedback. In comparison, even the most brutal grindcore appears like yacht rock.
If there is any apt reference at all, it would have to be Japanese free jazz of the 1970s – as if Bordreuil was channeling the ghosts of Kaoru Abe and Masayuki Takayanagi at a cookout in her Brooklyn backyard.
It definitely reminds me of her performance at A L’Arme! festival.
The first ten minutes consist of a slow build-up of menacing power electronics.
Around the 13-minute mark, piercing cello sounds start to create the effect Dilloway so aptly describes in his blurb above, imagining how it might sound if the late Mika Vainio had collaborated with some “live squealing pigs.”
Around the 15-minute mark, the drone stops abruptly, while the cello screeches on, as chaotic and atonal as it gets for two minutes, then slowing down and turning into a sustained drone itself.
For the last five minutes of the piece, the humming electronics come back into view, evoking the aftermath of a devastating fire – a wasteland of smoke and destruction, while the listener shifts between shock and catharsis.
The strange mix of menace and melancholy at the start and the end of the piece gets explored further on the five- to seven-minute meditative drone works on the tape’s B-side, which sound more akin to Bordreuil’s live gigs with Laurel Halo than the title-giving piece. They all feel deeply connected to each other though.
Despite its forbidding and inaccessible nature, I’ve found myself constantly returning to 1991, Summer, Huntington Garage Fire.
An emotional interpretation would see the piece as a showcase of an eruption of rage and anger, framed by moments of sadness and introspection.
It feels as if Bordreuil is spilling out her soul without saying a single word.
The ambient noises in the live recording are telling – people are casually chatting in the beginning, but in the end you hear nothing but a few nervous coughs, then someone hesitantly exclaims “yeah” into the silence. The following applause quickly fades out.
1991, Summer, Huntington Garage Fire is one of the most puzzling pieces of music I’ve heard in recent years – a truly singular work of textural sound art. Leila Bordreuil is not trying to appeal to conventional standards of beauty or harmony; her music doesn’t adhere to any classical or experimental tradition, not even those of free improvised or noise music.
All cassette tapes from the first run are gone by now, but here’s hope that a second edition or even a vinyl or CD version might appear in the future. Many critics and artists have included and lauded the album in their year-end roundups, with Laurel Halo calling it “dialed, multivalent and fearless” in her last newsletter. Another wave of appreciation might be imminent.
I truly believe this is one of those rare, special albums that might go from almost overlooked at first to becoming an inspiration and a reference point for other fearless artists in years to come.
It’s a fairly relentless sonic exploration, the cello as an instigator setting it apart, reminding of PLL synthesis (the squealing pigs). Would be interesting to learn which effects she was using.