The French duo Cheval De Frise is represented by Vincent Beysselance on drums and Thomas Bonvalet playing an amplified classical guitar. Oddly enough, their music is even less conventional than their line-up. It’s easy enough to put this twosome in the dusty box of Avant-Garde Rock, just the polyrhythms and dissonant chords by themselves point adequately in that direction. This does not mean that Cheval De Frise sounds like anything else, though, as the connoisseurs will instantly recon, for it temporarily has nothing to do with RIO or geographically with the Canterbury scene.

From the first contact of Bonvalet’s hand with the strings, the realisation comes that this is something special. His playing fuses serious musicianship with ubiquitous insanity. He can remind one of Derek Bailey’s Impro, simultaneously complimented with warm lower tones that serve as bass under fragile lines at which the overused term Post-Rock pops into mind. Speaking of independence, Beysselance is a master. His play is delicate and complex, open and almost thin, yet with remarkable outbursts of noise in many layers. His rhythms have more in common with jazz and Afro-Cuban independency than with rock, but for some reason, it still sounds like the latter. This brings up the mention of Don Caballero, Math Rock that has some parallels with Cheval De Frise, except this French pair is much lighter in the stomach and heavier on the mind.

Although La Lame Du Mat is composed out of discordant sounds of vibrating nylon, highly syncopated rhythms and insane outbursts of warp-speed picking, it’s simultaneously more fluent, dynamic and natural than your average slap of Post-Rock. It may be the melodic approach of either musicians, or my surprise about this duality is born from the light distraction that all this spastic noise has from soothing melodies, when played both at once. Either way, buy this.