The French sound artist and photographer Bastien Pons brings a unique single, "One Minute of America," an immersive landscape that transforms a typical street life recording into a slowly blossoming meditation.
"One Minute of America" stretches its little scrap of reality out into something dreamlike. The recording dissolves into a mood, a space that seems somehow both familiar and alien, like you're standing on a street corner inside someone else's memory. It's not about narrative, it's an exercise in constructing suspension, a condition where time stretches. The piece starts with soft footfalls, scattered voices, and faint whispers of the everyday. It's the kind of grain that you could post without it drawing your gaze, but in Pons's hands, a gateway is made to another place. A gentle, eccentric kick drum enters not to push the track forward, but to anchor it, keeping the soundscape from tumbling away while everything else spins around. It's quiet, subtle, gentle like a heartbeat that never demands attention but also never abandons you.
His background in musique concrète, with Bernard Fort as a professor, shines through here. He does not treat sound as melody or rhythm, but as texture and contrast, sculpting the usage of audio in the same way he frames his stark, contemplative photographs. This piece, from his first full-length album, "Blinded," takes that vision of sound as a complement to silence, fragile, heavy, and alive to a pretty extreme level.
With "One Minute of America," Bastien Pons alerts us. A moment is always susceptible to multiple minute interpretations, it just gets longer when you listen closer. It's less a track than that space you step into, and once inside, time operates differently.