Éric La Casa has an uncanny knack for collecting swatches of quotidian life and rearranging or altering them to produce new and interesting views. He visits and records ordinary places: a car park, a shipyard, his own apartment, and gives us detailed looks (listens?) at each, homing in on neglected or unheard sonic life.

Here, in collaboration with recordist Marc Baron, his attention is turned to the workings of a film restoration lab. We get deeply sensuous sounds of the machinery and its attendant workings, along with bits of dialogue and snippets of conversations. This practice, in this location, calls into question the various acts of archiving, and what we choose to archive, in a universe of never-ending Stuff. The duo is archiving the archiving, so to speak.

Lest you think that this practice can't possibly yield anything even remotely musical, I can assure you that is not the case. Passages of sound/silence have been carefully chosen and shored up against each other, layered with words/voices and collated in surprising sequences. Abrupt changes in the sound field sit alongside intimate listening to hum and scrape, very much in the manner of a good instrumental improvisation. Parts of it sound like a demonstration of the various filmic processes with accompanying explanations, and others are fly-on-the-wall captures of running reels and clashing film tins.

The whole is a brilliant example of what can be assembled from field recordings and tape processing, and it adds admirably to La Casa's growing body of work.