The Pop In Sets

Just to remind you of where we are and what we're doing here, we're using this shut-in, quarantine period of the coronavirus pandemic to explore the massive and somewhat intimidating catalog of recordings by the obscure and mysterious French drone band Natural Snow Buildings.  We started near the beginning of their discography with their post-rock albums Ghost Folks (2003) and The Winter Ray (2004), and then explored their first folk-drone effort, the popular The Dance of the Moon and the Sun (2006).

That's a lot of music to absorb - over six hours duration - so we've been lingering a bit at this point in the band's history.  We listened to a few live videos of performances from the period and of later performances of songs from this period, and we explored an early, self-released cassette tape of theirs from 2000, Two Sides of a Horse.  Since we have a lot of time on our hands, and since the music from this period is so rich and rewarding, we're going to dwell in this space for just a little longer.  

The video above is a bootleg recording of a set NSB performed in 2002 at a Paris venue called Pop In, locaated at 105 Rue Amelot in the Oberkampf district of the 11th arrondissement.  It's still open (although  technically its temporarily closed for the exact same reason we have the time right now to listen to NSB). For reference, the infamous Bataclan is about a block away. 

This set was performed before either Ghost Folks or The Winter Ray were released, and opens with the echo-plexed, ringing guitar figure that's heard throughout the Mae Brussel-Experiments on Monkeys portion of The Winter Ray.  One thing notable here is that Solange is on cello for the set; in later videos, she's joining Mehdi and playing counterpoint on electric guitar.   

The second composition starts at around the 15:00-minute mark. I can't place it, but it sounds more Winter Ray than Ghost Folks, which is interesting considering  that in 2002, when this set occurred, they were a year from releasing Ghost Folks and two years from The Winter Ray.  It shows how long some of their compositions have incubated before getting recorded.

Here's another Pop In set, this one from May 2003, and here they are covering songs from that year's release, Ghost Folks.

Solange is still on cello at this time and the set up is so similar to the 2002 set that the only reason I know for sure that it's not the same set is that Mehdi has a different shirt.  

The first 30 minutes of this set consist of tracks 2 and 3 from Ghost Folks, If I Could Find My Way Through the Darkness followed by a lovely 18-minute version of I Came Down Here, although with a completely different spoken field recording behind it than on the recorded version.  I can't place the third song - it might be an improvisation or an unreleased piece (or I might just be missing it). The fourth track, starting at around the 46-minute mark, is They Are Still Hanging Around, also from Ghost Folks.  The dissonant noise piece starting around the 58:30 mark sounds reminiscent of some of the Mt. Weather passages from The Winter Ray, with the telegraph from the Broadcast tracks thrown into the mix for good measure.  In any event, at this late point in the set NSB are clearly in Winter Ray territory and are foreshadowing some of the more challenging aspects of the music they were to soon be releasing.

Personally, I find these videos pleasurable even if there's not really much going on visually to hold your attention for the cumulative 1 and ¾ of an hour.  However, it's rewarding to me to hear these songs I've grown to love performed in a different setting, and the videos provide documentation of NSB at the height of their post-rock phase, before The Dance of the Moon and the Sun came along and changed everything.