Feu Follets

Feu Follets, or ‘fire sprites,’ is the latest in a run of strangely comforting albums by Phoebé Guillemot, aka RAMZi. There’s something about her music that makes the familiar unfamiliar, the everyday somehow alien; maybe it’s in the way she renders acoustica hyperreal, or treats all her sound sources as strangely pliable, mutant phenomena, like sticky goo or playdough in a DJ’s hands. Like a number of her prior releases, Feu Follets hits a broadly Balearic mark; sometimes it’s so redolent of mid ‘90s exotica-electronica that it’s like tripping right back to the days of B12, Ultramarine, System 7… Not a bad place to be, really. But that undersells, to a degree, Guillemot’s own skills, the chintzy poetry of her productions (note: this is not a diss, in any way), their sly pleasures, their patterned sensuality.