"Songs is the much-anticipated follow-up to Parisian sound designer and musician Sébastien Roux’s beautiful cd Pillow (Apestaartje, 2004). The simple title of Songs hides a deep work that Roux states is based in mathematics, symmetry (and assymetry) and organized randomness. Songs is a skillfully and beautifully rendered album of gentle and sometimes not-so-gentle acoustic instruments and melodic granular clouds. Each song is titled simply by the instruments that make it, thus stressing the process involved in their production. From the ubiquitous guitars, piano, and drums to the more exotic metallophone, harp and contrabass, Roux combines these acoustic instruments with digital sounds and makes a point to keep the focus on the instruments themselves, allowing for their subtleties and idiosyncrasies to come to the forefront.

Roux’s music is personal and multi-faceted; From warm and drowsy ambient tones to digital fests of errors and erratic rhythms to a more song-structured approach hinting at a distant relative of submereged pop music. His influences include musique concrete, folk songs, and electronic music and his work at IRCAM in Paris wraps his ecclectic tastes into an expertly produced work of digital sound that does not rely on one particular sound or motif but rather highlights a breadth of processes and unique sonic juxtaposititons."

-12k

"Greg Davis and Sébastien Roux are back with their second collaborative album following the acclaimed release “Paquet surprise”. “Merveilles”, translated from the French word as wonderland, describes the album very fitting as the songs have a very illustrative quality. Where the previous album relied a bit more on sweet melodies and quick changes “Merveilles” explores different sound worlds in depth and illuminates a terrain of diverse emotional scenarios. Silent passages of field recordings are combined with subtle harmonic layers, interrupted by sudden noise eruptions and contrasted by folk like guitar melodies and very concrete sounds, often leaving the listener wondering what the origin of this tone might be.
It is a pleasure to have a documentary of this interesting collaboration in which both musicians are able to realise their grown individual expertise. Sébastien Roux, working at the IRCAM and well known for his success in continuing the French line of music concrète in a new and contemporary way, clearly helps to establish the abstract narrative form of this record with arrangements of cut and edited pieces of concrete recordings. The influence of Greg Davis, often described as the anchor figure in the forming of the laptop folk scene, is clearly audible in melodic guitar lines and the construction of dense harmonic drones. But the strength of this collaboration is the fact that Greg Davis and Sébastien Roux combine their musical ideas creating a very unique approach of their own. This record clearly combines elements of serious and popular music in a highly thoughtful and contemporary way, widening the edges of by now established stylistic fields that Davis and Roux once helped to define.
“Merveilles” consists of edits of live recordings made during a tour through Europe and the US in 2005 - it is the pleasant proof that electronic music of such richness in detail can be played and composed live."

-ahornfelder