Memory is rarely as polite as we would like it to be. It does not preserve things intact; it scratches them, distorts them, misplaces them and occasionally returns them years later in a form we barely recognise. "Vestiges", the new album by French composer Olivier Alary for LINE, is built around precisely this unruly quality of remembrance. A continuous 43-minute composition divided into five movements, it brings together twelve amplified lap steel guitars and electronics, treating the ensemble almost as a single instrumental organism rather than twelve separate voices.

The concept may sound cerebral, but the music itself is remarkably physical. Alary's starting point is almost disarmingly simple: sustained slide movements across the strings generate resonance, interference and tiny fluctuations in pitch. From this limited vocabulary emerges an extraordinarily unstable sonic field. The guitars begin to lose their conventional identity, producing tones that hover somewhere between strings, voices, electrical hum and distant environmental noise. It is less a choir of guitars than a choir remembering that it was once something else.

Alary has been exploring the borderlands between composition, electronic music and sound art for decades, with previous work appearing on LINE including "Pieces for Sine Wave Oscillators" and "Apparitions (Vol. 1)". His approach has consistently favoured acoustic phenomena that seem to occupy the threshold between recognisable sound and abstraction. With "Vestiges", that threshold becomes the entire subject.
The opening movement establishes the principle without rushing to explain it. Sustained tones gradually interfere with one another, creating beating frequencies and harmonic shadows that seem to appear independently of the performers. Nothing dramatic happens, yet the ear becomes increasingly occupied. What initially resembles a static drone reveals itself as a landscape in constant microscopic motion.

The second and third movements deepen the illusion. Noise, saturation, friction and unstable intonation become structural components rather than imperfections to be corrected. The effect recalls the physical deterioration of analogue recordings: hiss, distortion, wear and the vague sensation that something has been copied too many times. Yet there is no nostalgia for obsolete technology here. These qualities have become part of the composition itself.

This is particularly effective because "Vestiges" never tries to imitate an old recording. Instead, it behaves like one.

Alary's fascination with Robert Smithson's "Partially Buried Woodshed" and Daniel Spoerri's "Le Déjeuner sous l'herbe" provides an illuminating parallel. Both works involve objects or events being buried, concealed and subsequently encountered through excavation. "Vestiges" applies a similar logic to sound. These tones feel less composed than unearthed, as if they had spent years underground accumulating pressure and geological dirt before somebody finally decided to listen to them.

That metaphor also explains why the album can feel strangely intimate despite its scale. Twelve lap steels should, theoretically, announce themselves as an ensemble. Here they dissolve into a collective body. Their proximity produces psychoacoustic effects that are almost vocal: pitches seem to breathe, tones swell and recede, and harmonic combinations appear where no individual instrument appears responsible for them.

The fourth movement is particularly striking in this respect. The music seems to hover between emergence and disappearance, with fragments of apparent melody forming briefly before being absorbed back into the surrounding mass. It creates the peculiar impression of hearing something through a wall, or perhaps remembering a sound rather than actually hearing it. The distinction becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

By the fifth movement, the music has acquired a remarkable emotional weight without ever resorting to conventional expression. There are no melodies to hum afterwards, no dramatic climax waiting patiently for its cue, no obvious narrative resolution. Instead, Alary makes tiny alterations feel consequential. A change in density, a slight shift in pitch or a new layer of distortion can suddenly alter the entire perceived architecture.

That patience is the album's greatest virtue.

"Vestiges" demands attention, but it does not reward impatience. Its drama exists at the scale of minute changes, where listening becomes less about following events and more about noticing that the supposedly static object has been moving all along. Human beings usually require explosions, choruses or at least someone falling down the stairs before they agree that something has happened. Alary gets away with a tremor in the harmonic field.

The result is haunting without relying on the usual vocabulary of haunted music. There are no ghosts being theatrically summoned. Instead, the instruments become conduits for absence. The “voices” we seem to hear are produced by resonance and interference, but our perception insists on giving them a human quality. The séance is therefore partly performed by the musicians and partly by our own brains, which remain stubbornly committed to finding faces in clouds and voices in static.

"Vestiges" ultimately suggests that deterioration can be a form of creation. Its sounds become beautiful not despite their noise, instability and opacity, but because of them. Every imperfection seems to carry evidence of something having happened before.

And that may be the album's quietest achievement: it makes time audible without trying to illustrate it.

The music does not reconstruct the past.

It lets the past leave a stain.