Michel F. Côté

2004 release ** Everything sounds remarkably organic, blending the electronic and the acoustic into a fluid whole. As I walked around Yonkers, NY's Untermyer Park today, a space I've known intimately for the past fifteen years, I listened to the snatches of melody 63 Apparitions offered up through my headphones. Untermyer is filled with ruined and decaying buildings, overgrown vegetation and crumbling faux-Roman architecture. I couldn't help but thinking that Côté's music provided my stroll with a perfect soundtrack, appearing before me as the fragments of a damaged landscape whose former splendor was now buried beneath layers of grime. Far from robbing the original of its beauty, the new elements accumulating atop it had turned it into something even more beautiful, with so much texture concentrated in each surface that I broke off a piece of the pool's flooring with the heel of my shoe to pocket and take home with me. And I again came to the realization that music is that which helps animate the mute ugliness of the world around us : one view, a thousand notes.  It's the 3rd publication, out of 24 (one for each hour of a day), produced by &records (Michel f Côté & Fabrizio Gilardino).