"When Dark Ambient meets Industrial Deviance"
Le CD contient un clip vidéo du titre "Conjuration" réalisé par Baron Saturne
Les noirceurs d'un son indus dark ambient cinématographique, celui du quartet avant-gardiste international AERE AETERNUS, dont les premières parutions ont eu lieu sous formes de démos en 1997.
Via un son renfermé, AERE AETERNUS se réalise dans une optique parasitaire et noire, sourde et évocatrice tout le long de ce premier format album, Humanity needs no funeral. Hybridant les thématiques sexuelle et funéraire, la formation joue sur le confinement, mais ses volumes ne se contentent pas d'un aplat atmosphérique. Ils intègrent une substance pessimiste, nihiliste et mortuaire dont les fragments bruitistes, ponctuellement, donnent un aboutissement physique à une optique globalement retenue et oppressive. La tension est là, prégnante.
Enigmatically entitled 46 – 46th street, minute, year, or something else altogether – this experimental album encompasses a wide array of contemporary influences, from rock to noise. Mainly electro, even when pastiching the most classic of rock (making for a nice exercise in style in “Don’t believe in rock ‘n’ roll”), Atlan’s project combines the energy of rock, the irony of punk, and retains from noise music a taste for the outer limits of sound.
Fiery and spontaneous, the album penetrates variety of sound landscapes without ever changing tone. Insistent, apocalyptic sequences (from “Irreligion” to the blast-off countdown of “16 bits”) lead into strong, sharp tribal airs (“Same old song”), Japanese drums and chants – and then suddenly, the ghost of a central European violin appears to inflect the insistent vibrations of a Velvet-style intro (“Velvet”, appropriately enough).
On the album’s more experimental tracks, waves of signals, sounds and archaic animal calls seem to seep out from below the earthly surface (“Sous terre”). And shifting back from land to sky, subsequent tracks instantly add further dimensions in shimmering layers. The journey comes to an end in nearly shamanesque fashion, to the rhythm of a body drifting from life – a sonorous as I lay dying in which heartbeats become the only anchoring point in a universe falling apart (“Faux-semblants”).
As a bonus, there is a David Lynch-style video by Magali Marc for the track “Irreligion”, in which an oppressive series of black and white shots evoke a hunting scene, a war set to break out. Lenses, binoculars and other visual devices conceal the protagonists and widen the gap with reality, while through a loudspeaker, an imperious voice intones a serious of incomprehensible warnings. Then come the deafening rhythm and unexpected sound of an instrument invented by Sonic Surgeon, a sort of horn with a powerful, modulated tone that relaunches the offensive, lifts the weight of the oppressive layers, and sets off toward a blazing, dissonant dawn.
+++Additional track: “To the River”, a dub-step variation on the theme of bewitchment by Sasqwash, with Atlan on flute, recorded in a lightning session in Senseless Records’s Arsenal studio.
This deft, sustained album is the product of a collaboration between two musicians who have already established themselves as solo artists in different musical and cultural domains – Japanese low-fi and European experimental, or vice-versa. The result is a pared-down sound that avoids showing off and keeps technology to a minimum, striving to focus on the realm of the body, pursue vital rhythms, and embody sensation with a sort of authority and breezy precision.
About Atlan, alias Sonic Surgeon
“Sonic Surgeon” came into being in London in 2008, but carries musical traces of an earlier musical life in the last century…
In the meantime, the surgeon of sound had found new life under the name Atlan as a communications consultant in the late 1980s, as a sometimes-lumberjack, and above all, as a painter since 1990.
A historic figure in artists’ squats, Atlan was at Pôle Pi (1997), Alter Nation, and the Croustie’s “gallery” on Avenue Montaigne, among others. Traces of his passage can be seen on a variety of industrial wasteland walls, in Lisbon, in Kassel for Documenta X, and in Esch/Alzette (Luxembourg). On canvas, he has exhibited at the Galerie Horizon in Paris, the Electron Libre, the Espace Beaurepaire in early 2010, and finally, the Miroiterie squat, where he is currently working, and will continue to do so until expulsion… A documentary was made on his work by Lily Tournay (“Atlan, Paintings or Mirrors?”, 2009), but the streets of Paris know him first and foremost as a mystifying character, the Sheep of Belleville, a little urban legend that made the waves of Arte Radio (2010):
http://www.arteradio.com/son.html?615809.
Sonic Surgeon’s tunes were heard in England and Scotland in the summer of 2009, and he regularly plays in France, both alone and in noise-oriented groups like LETOH, Rumble Crumble, and Iniram Oniram (available on myspace). Prior to this, he worked with Japanese painter and musician Iro Doï, delicate sculptor of electronic layers, for the album, which was recorded in seclusion in Saint-Loup-de-Naud in the winter of 2009.
