Astatine is the solo project of Stéphane Recrosio, based in Paris, France. For about two decades Recrosio is better known as member of the post-rock/slowcore band Acetate Zero with whom he has done several sublime releases on labels such as Arbouse Recordings, Intercontinental, Claire’s Echo, Drumkid Records and others, and shared the stage with The Album Leaf, Encre, Empress, Rothko, The New Year and Chris Brokaw, among others. Since 2011 Astatine has released numerous albums, EPs and singles on labels such as Cotton Goods, Cantos Propaganda, [A…]UTOPROD, Éditions Vibrisse, Doubtful Sounds and Recrosio’s own labels Orgasm and Fissile.

'Global Exposure' is Astatine’s new full-length album and first for Sound In Silence, featuring twenty new compositions with a total duration of something more than 46 minutes. Utilizing fuzzy electric guitars, delicate acoustic guitar arpeggios, mumbled and distorted vocals, minimal bass lines, rough drums, heavily processed found sounds, loops of abstract noises and field recordings.

Okay, all of the previous was gleaned off the Sound In Silence one-sheet that accompanied the CD. Before I even get into the review, I did my due diligence in checking out Acetate Zero as well as other releases by Astatine. Regarding the former, they are a mildly enjoyable female-fronted (often, but not always) alternative band, in the somewhat typical late '90s/early 2000s indie mode, with occasional noise/shoegaze elements. Regarding the latter, a survey of the great volume of material Astatine has produced has yielded both more and less interesting works than what's on this album; uneven, unpredictable, and sometimes unendurable. Out of context of course that's rather meaningless, so let me add some context. To me, 'Global Exposure' sounds mostly like dubious aural garbage with an occasional glimmer of light. It is amateurish and unabashedly awful, contextually incoherent, and utterly lacking in any semblance of meaning. It didn't begin badly, staring with "Snow Loop #1," 3 minutes of a mild noise loop drone, but then "Rotary Combine" puts forth what sounds like a rehearsal session with a guitar progression that sounds clean at first, but grows progressively dirtier with distortion as it repeats, and repeats, and repeats...I should point out that the album is 20 tracks of mostly short duration (the longest at slightly over 5 minutes, most of them under 3 minutes) so there isn't a lot of development within each track, and mercifully, they're over before they really start to annoy the crap out of you. One might think that within those confines and multitude of mini-works Recrosio's experimentalism might yield at least a couple of gems, but alas, no; things actually get worse as the album progresses. "Blitz Theorem" sounds like trying to repair an electronic gizmo in real time with disappointing results. "Decipher The Fall" has all the charm of a candid cassette recording of a band rehearsal with the least vocally proficient member of the band subbing for the singer who couldn't make it. I couldn't even begin to describe "Faux Positif 9" in its crackly quasi-drone-moan defective vinyl record mode. "Underdrive" has some pretty acoustic guitar, until the fuzzy guitar overdub comes in and spoils everything. "Softcore 99" is nothing more than vocally fucking around over some guitar/bass progressions. The "experimentalism" only gets messier and more insipid as time goes on and tracks pass by. I picture a couple of 13 year olds who just discovered Sonic Youth trying to emulate Thurston Moore, but get distracted by the noises their improperly maintained equipment keeps making. It's as if someone thought it was a good idea to record any old thing they came up with after smoking much too much weed. There is absolutely no filter of any kind, and that does not make for a good album, unless you happen to be a music genius, which Astatine is clearly not. I don't know what possessed George Mastrokostas to sign, let alone master this project, as it is certainly not one of Sound in Silence's finer moments. Thankfully limited to 150 copies.