It’s not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to know where, or perhaps even how, to begin discussing French cartoonist Pia-Melissa Laroche’s Musical Pretext For Gestural Adventure — the fifth release in editor/publisher Justin Skarhus’ formally-inventive Entropy Editions series (or, as the back cover would have it, Entropy Editions 05), but it strikes me that’s rather the point : Laroche isn’t interested in showing us a world that can be described so much as one that can be sensed and felt.

It’s a tall order, after all, to craft a silent story that revolves around the transformative power of music, and to populate said wordless (and, crucially, tuneless) narrative with anthropomorphic forms that, in a pinch, most closely resemble trees, but for all that the through-line here is fairly easily discernible : events progress toward a conclusion that, depending on one’s reading and/or mood, is either…