Le Diable Degoutant - Du Formol Orgonal LP
With a nose powdered with the promise of escape, a devil emerges from the reserve he once claimed for himself with the complicity of the warden. In his new cookbook, he deciphers for us several ways of inhabiting the night, this refuge that runs beneath the day, and sketches, with a light touch, the map of the circuits winding between woods and bushes, where strange trumpets grow. It is in their coppery foliage that he cools the fire in his cheeks. Constantly shedding his skin, the devil knows when and how to turn the page and turns it once more, pushing deeper the archaeology of his subterranean states and movements thanks to the renewed precision of his instruments. Polyrhythms of shells and hollow trunks, small microphones capturing, through the floorboards, the dances of pumping hooves, the clash of old, blazing censers. Globular, ragged synthesizers, like flutes drawn from a still, snores of fire underground, groans of non-human entities.
Each track is a miniature tableau animated by sonic characters on sabbatical leave, whose moaning laughter, murmurs, and stamping feet accompany the singing and magnetic silences of the devil, our guide. The tone is set at the beginning of the album (A1): the tape recorder starts, stutters, then a trembling melody plunges us headlong into a night streaked with bizarre birds and punctuated by the breath of a catfish sleeping beneath the mud. From this primordial soup emerges a rose of Jericho, a flower that shares with sounds and dreams the ability to remain dry and untouched for centuries, as if waiting for someone to finally awaken it and watch it vanish into dust the next moment.
Thus, the devil offers us eleven enveloping modulations, eleven nocturnal stations, eleven formulas for personal alchemy, skillfully dodging any identification with a given genre or mode. If one sometimes thinks one hears the echo of invented traditions, it is only to better slip into a strange bacchanalian cumbia, the soundtrack to a revolting ceremony where one hallucinates the meal of an entire blackbird (A3). The strings of an old violin, the devil's fetish, seem to creak from the deserted backstage of a mountain dive at the bear festival (A5); the rustling of butterfly wings that make the light tremble punctuates the love-soaked dream (A6).
The second side will be as dark as it is danceable. It opens with an almost cartoonish groove accompanied by the rhythm of a stubborn clock, and the little bird hammering out the hour warns us of the impending oil spill (B1). Listening to the following song (B2), a headbanger of the world turned upside down, hands become sweaty and instinctively reach for the nearest cup, following the lead of this mouth that speaks of mouth. Under the influence of such obscure alcohol, we witness a kind of infection of the landscape, its contours becoming so many blisters and suppurating pustules, as if dark thoughts and the darkness of the world conspired to rot the earth itself (B3). Each time, however, the devil suggests a way to transmute the nightmare of the day into liberating night: through trance, rhythm, and dance. Thus, the irresistible pulse of the penultimate song (B4), like a locomotive with a driving heart, gives us breath and a step light enough to emerge from the night.
Along this tortuous path, Occitan rubs shoulders with French, sobriety with intoxication, acid with alkaline, death with desire. For the night, this fluid that runs beneath the day, is made of a galvanizing liquid that bathes everything in it. Everything, like the devil himself, is ceaselessly transformed within it; everything dies and is resurrected, everything is polarized into desires and obsessions. The dross and clots of reality, swept along in a purgatory dance, dissolve there, and the enigmas find their impossible solution in these soft labyrinths pierced by flashes of lightning.
