Electronic/Review Bastien Pons - BLINDED
From France, Bastien Pons creates experiences, not just music. With a background in black-and-white photography and a deep grounding in musique concrète (under the mentorship of Bernard Fort), his artistic practice fuses sound and image into a raw, sensory world. His compositions are immersive, introspective sound sculptures—built from field recordings, ambient layers, industrial grit, and minimal melodies.
Bastien Pons's first album, “BLINDED,” is more than just a recording; it's a gradual disentanglement of perception. Pons treats sound as a physical texture, much influenced by his black-and-white photography, and crafts each composition with the attention to detail of a visual artist working with light and shadow. The end product is an intensely evocative and emotionally stirring piece that resembles a sonic installation more than an album.
“BLINDED,” which draws inspiration from ambient minimalism, musique concrète, and experimental electronic music, use sound as brushstrokes and silence as its canvas. Each track develops with purposeful slowness as field recordings, far-off mechanical whirs, and muted melodic bits appear and disappear. The production has a visceral element to it; you can practically feel the echo of a forgotten room, the weight of a breath, or the texture of a surface.
Pons creates a room for introspection rather than leading the listener through a story. Unbound by genre or structure, the tracks blend together to create an immersive universe that requires the listener to slow down, focus, and interact with subtleties. It's an invitation to live in the space between things: between sound and stillness, between vulnerability and detachment, between clarity and obscurity.
“BLINDED” rewards silence more than it does attention. It is a sound echo of looking with one's eyes closed, a contemplative investigation of frailty. Bastien Pons provides a refreshing dive into subdued complexity during a period of overstimulation. This is music in the form of presence, texture, and emotion.