Taking his moniker from a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album inscription ("...and these quiet armies will march on..."), Thisquietarmy is the project of Montréal artist Eric Quach, a pioneer of the Canadian experimental music scene. His sci-fi post-apocalyptic musical landscape looms not in destruction, but in the relentless march of optimization. Where craftsmanship once united the process with its creator, we now face an endless division of labor, fragmenting the human experience of work in the name of efficiency. "Staying ahead" becomes our daily mantra, "constant evolution" our survival strategy, as we engineer what we call a "better future." It's how we will all end up working one day, while Artificial Intelligence, the new strategy for success, will need more and more nuclear power and human workforce. Keep in mind that a country's energy policy is always correlated with its industrial strategy.
After a steady decade-long career in a scientific field and a corporate environment, Eric Quach launched an adventurous solo journey that evolved organically and exponentially, leading him to release nearly 50 albums on more than 30 different labels and accumulate nearly 600 performances in some 40 countries. For Quach, the result of this impressive creative process is less important than the journey itself, which has led him to engage in notable collaborations with prominent figures of the experimental music scene: Michel "Away" Langevin (Voivod) and Aidan Girt (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Exhaust, OSB) on drums, Philippe Leonard (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Double Negative Collective) - who is known for creating the visual elements of Godspeed concerts - on 16mm film and digital visuals, and writer Annie Lafleur (Le Quartanier) on a poetry project.
Released on Coup sur Coup, Les Estampes maintains the solid, ambitious formula that defines Thisquietarmy: improvised soundscape sketches, one-takes featuring multiple-textured loops occurring simultaneously, wide frequency ranges, bassy low ends, crisp details, and a meditative aspect that induces a hypnotic state of mind. Having never learned to play "real" guitar, so to speak, Quach has always approached his instrument as an experimental means of expression, using it as a tone generator where loops form an inherent basis for creating mental imagery.
The album as a whole describes a mechanical ascension to overcome a terrain's steepness, where the music becomes a channel for confronting the weight disparity between an individual and industry's immense wealth production ("Funiculaire") while signaling dangers and obstacles to overcome ("Corne de brume"). If music is Quach's medium for escaping reality and the real world, this alternative universe serves essentially as a mirror to his mind, depicting a laboratory for mechanical inventions - a new form of mechanical arts and practical science to imitate nature (“Saint Bourdonnement”).
