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Nervure Magnétique's two mountainous tracks shock by bleeding unpredictably out of audible range at both ends. Because track two, for example, does not present expected musical progressions beginning with methodical test pattern format in which basic analogue-sounding tones of varying duration and texture are laid down in guileless succession at a drastically low volume leaving you vulnerable to the sonic assault at 12-odd minutes, you are never sure where to set your listening parameters. You must either except the loss of the shadow or highlight detail or excavate from these extremities with the volume control.

Julien Ottavi is not the type of experimentalist so inclined to subtly expand the listener's perceptual horizons as to forcibly pry them open. The experiments he conducts on you have a similarly gaping range from the fuck-you boy's noise to the subtle strategy of loosening his grip on the listener's attention so perilously with the low tones at the end of track one that you forget what it is you are supposed to be engaged in.

Ottavi knows how to manipulate with the direct physicality of sound. In track one, simply with a slowly building increase in volume, reedy contemplative tones become pressing and forbidding, and effects a complete inversion in scale around the listener's body, moving from it-is-in-you, to you-are-in-it.

It is his intelligent violence and subtle brutality which distinguishes his output. In Nervure Magnétique, you are also led through passages of intense beauty and clarity. That he is able to assemble such extremes without making a show of musicality, and attain coherence, shows that there is a persuasive overriding intelligence at work.

- Anna Sanderson, 2003