by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

With track titles like “Vapeur mandarine,” “Chameau hongrois,” “Chapati” and “Kudu,” and instruments ranging from bouzoukis to djembes, one might think that there’s a patchwork multinationalism to Orchestraki, Maxime Rioux’s third album of music with his distinctive Automates Ki system. But a close listen quickly reveals that no matter where in the world Rioux (who assumes the surname de la Rochefoucauld for this project) unpacks his Automates Ki, they’re going to seem strange and exotic.

“Every place I’ve played, in Africa or whatever,” says Rioux, who’s taken his Automates Ki to Senegal, Swaziland, Norway and elsewhere, “everybody likes it. It’s not pretentious to say that, because it’s a unique system. It doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

If anything, Orchestraki and its two predecessors seem like music from some nonexistent nation—one populated by wind-up birdmen and insects in fancy dancing shoes. In a live setting, Rioux’s Automates Ki do little to dispel such surrealist musings. His “musicians” are scattered all over the room and resemble mangled, misbegotten children’s toys from some time and place that never was.

Rioux plays the part of the mad, manipulative god behind a centralized soundboard, sending out dozens of sonic pulses of varying frequencies, too high or low to be heard, to 30 or so of his Automates (and tossing in some treated trumpet to boot). Each one combines a small woofer and a spring-attached stick, bow or mallet, which strike, stroke or pluck an instrument, be it a battered violin, a classic snare drum or merely a tin can chosen for its particular tone.

Sounds to be found

If it sounds like a lot for one guy to handle, that’s because it is. Rioux has recently caved in and overcome his reservations about digital diddling. “Before, when I was mixing live, I had so many things to do. It was like a marathon of memory. I sometimes got in the position of being totally overwhelmed by all the stuff. The computer just makes me feel more relaxed on stage.”

There’s more to it too. “I can program it so that at the same time I have the percussion playing, I can juxtapose sounds. Because they are speakers, they can emit audible sounds if I want. So with the computer, I can put on another coat of sound.

“I don’t put the computer on a pedestal. It’s just a machine that will do what you want. The music is still live. It’s the ambiguity of something that’s composed on a screen, but when it’s played live, it still has this sparkling of a cymbal being hit in real time in front of you, so it doesn’t change the music, because you hear real sounds.”

Some challenges, however, are beyond a computer’s capabilities, such as how to transport his little battalion of noisemakers. The trick is to pack only the mechanisms, not the instruments, and, in the tradition of acts like Test Department, work with whatever’s on hand in any location. One man’s junk can quickly become this man’s treasure.

“I ask the festival to find me a cymbal, a snare drum and a bass drum, and all the string instruments, I’ll collect them when I come. I need about four days beforehand. In Norway, I found this beautiful baroque violin with five sympathetic strings and a mother-of-pearl fretboard, some sort of Viking thing!”

After a decade of refining his Automates Ki, Rioux isn’t anywhere near tired of the project. If anything, it’s quite the opposite. He’s left the hermetic confines of the musique actuelle scene and found a home at the new local label Storyboard, gathered visual documentation a-plenty from his African trip and pondered the visual aspect of his live performances. “It’s 10 years now, and I still like it. I still find ways to go further.”

CD launch at 135 Van Horne W. on
Thursday and Friday, July 27–28, 8 p.m., $10

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