Solitarium bears all the hallmarks of a mid-career work from an artist practiced at his craft. Toàn is the longest running alias of Brittany-based electronic producer Anthony Elfort, who has spent his decades-long career producing dub techno, running a Parisian ragga jungle collective, exploring electroacoustic and neoclassical composition, and as a teenager doing “electro”-inspired production work for Québécois singer-songwriter Bertrand Pierre.
Toàn has described Solitarium as an essentially back-to-basics affair in two senses. In the first, after intermittent bouts of gear acquisition syndrome, he’s pared back his setup to little more than a secondhand Deluge synthesizer, Tascam Portastudio, a selection of effects units, and his extensive sample library. In the second, Solitarium is a deeply personal exploration of what drives him to continue making music—composed in an unhurried manner over a span of nearly two years, reckoning with the equally personal impact of neurodivergence on his creative process.
The album unfolds as a series of unhurried sketches that narrate Toàn’s gradual mastery of the new-to-him Deluge. These sketches, numbered 0-8, alternately emphasize different elements in his chosen palette of synthesized drones, naturalistic field recordings, and a wide range of acoustic samples, all deliberately degraded and reshaped in his cassette studio with final mastering done on an ancient copy of Sony Sound Forge.
In “DEL 2,” Toàn’s Deluge washes like polar waves or winter winds, an elegant trick with filtered white noise that harkens back at least as far as Jean-Michel Jarre’s EMS VCS 3 magic on Oxygène. Detuned piano keys occasionally punch through the mix like fishing weights through a crust of ice. “DEL 4” is another standout, what sounds like it could be a 60 hertz hum fleshed out and dragged a few hertz further down to accompany broken music box melodies and a ghostly zither. The theme carries into “DEL 5,” where it’s joined by plaintive, nautical horns. A comparison to their use on Sea Power’s iconic Disco Elysium soundtrack may be almost too on the nose.
Finally, it’s worth emphasizing the intentionality of Toàn’s tape work. Over the past several decades, as music production and consumption have become increasingly immaterial, the mighty cassette has enjoyed a cultural resurgence as a grounding device. But at its worst, tape just becomes another cliché: VST hiss, pops, flutter, and wow caked onto a song that doesn’t need it, frequently by younger producers who misguidedly conflate low-fidelity with sincerity. This is rife in ambient; but by contrast, Toàn demonstrates the range of tape-based production and analog mixing as an integral component of the production process, where line noise merges with his field recordings or abrades the mix at quiet moments, imperfections in tape loops introduce slight rhythmic elements to otherwise dreamy tracks, and so on. These are moments that reward close, repeat listens. Solitarium is full of them. (Marcello Ursic)
