In an age where the broad and sturdy genre labels of the last age (rock, jazz, etc.) have splintered into countless nano-genres, the very notion of genre becomes obsolete and we are left with the teeming fractal distinctions of the tag cloud to characterize every new album. So what is Weird Studies Vol. 3? When I look at its pre-release Bandcamp page, I see the tags experimental — ambient — soundtrack — Montreal. Fair enough. Montreal is Pierre-Yves’s home, and his music has been the soundtrack to the Weird Studies podcast for close to a decade. Experimental can mean a lot of things, but in practice it often means “weird,” which, again, fair enough. These are haunted soundscapes: "L’esprit d’escalier" evokes actual spirits on actual staircases. How about ambient? That might mean “music you can leave in the background,” but Weird Studies Vol. 3 is music that repays close attention.
What it discloses to attention, though, is ambient in a different sense of the word — it is music of an ambiance, a vibe. PYM is an artist of moods, of half-tints and fugitive memories. All these tracks are nocturnes, even For the Sun. It’s a sun that emits the light seen only in dreams, the light of a sun underground. In the virtual space of this album, PYM and his collaborators — mood-smiths all — have built a gallery of subtle vibes, each of them incommunicable in words and (as David Lynch liked to say) with a hair of an abstraction.
Moods are weird. You might think that one bad mood will be much the same as any other, but each mood has its own distinct colour, and once it’s over you will never see it again, not quite. Moods, like music, are too precise for words. And like music, they overpower us, enclosing us in their atmosphere. When you’re in a mood there’s no outside to it. And then it’s over and you wonder where you’ve been. That’s what it’s like to listen to this music. It’s a pocket dimension lit by an underground sun, a zone that enfolds us, as in a dream.
