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Le Motel

Odd Numbers / So Le

It took a village to create Le Motel's Odd Numbers / So Le. Beneath its pulsing, shimmering tones, the record is alive with the sounds of everyday life--purring mopeds, idle whistling, the din of kitchens and whisper of rain, voices joyful and contemplative, scenes of bustling cities and domestic intimacy.

Le Motel--who runs the Brussels-based record label Maloca--gathered sounds, photographs, and videos while traveling in Vietnam in 2023. From Hanoi he ventured to Hmong communities in the mountains near the border with China, building out a network of contacts gathered from friends and friends of friends. But Odd Numbers / So Le--which takes its title from traditional Vietnamese numerological beliefs and customs--is wholly unlike the extractive product typical of exploitative modes of Western tourism; the album's final shape was deeply dependent upon the participation of the people the artist met in Vietnam.

Back in Brussels after his travels, as Le Motel began working with his materials, he sent early drafts to his contacts, inviting their input. This back-and-forth eventually yielded a dynamic collective effort in which nine of the album's 15 tracks feature multiple composer credits. Among the album's diverse collaborators are Yvonne Quynh-Lan Duon, an educator and ethnomusicologist; Chi Chi, the daughter of a Hmong shaman; and Phapxa Chan, who contributes three poems inspired by landscape and Le Motel's own music (and, in one case, psychedelics).

The result is an album that is not about making sound, broadcasting it as a one-way communication, but instead about the empathic practice of listening--about listening as an integral and even ethical part of musical creation, even (especially!) when that music is created on a computer, rather than conjured by a group of players sharing space in real time. It's an album that adopts many of the traditional trappings of ambient music while reminding us of the importance of intentional modes of creation. Brian Eno famously said that ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting, but Le Motel's Odd Numbers / So Le suggests, to the contrary, the richness of experience available to us should we make the effort to open our ears.