Cinema portrays these as the dime-a-dozen, tough-guy moves du jour, but have you ever actually struck another's forehead with your own or received a kick to the groin? It hurts. A lot: you lose all mental faculties and motor skills for one to ninety seconds (a soccer-caused knee-to-groin collision laid me out for over an hour); you see actual stars; you definitely don't feel like fighting anymore and, if the brawl isn't over, end up wrestling — desperately — on the ground until someone breaks it up. A dynamic maelstrom of turntables, analog synths, guitar, piano and occasional voice, Franck Vigroux and Matthew Bourne's musical jabs, wallops, parries and, of course, head-butting yield similar results: chaos that ranges from brutal and cruel to disorienting and half-conscious. And, ultimately, rewarding and invigorating in an "it will put hair on your chest" way.
After an introductory dive-bombing blast of digital skips, modular screams and wailing metal, the duo nestles into "@Lisse" with gently trilling Rhodes and guest Annabelle Playe's fortissimo operatic call on the distant horizon. Getting their strength back, they modulate via reverb and reverse pedals, pass motifs to acoustic piano and Korg MS-20, then crank up sub-woofing thumps and vigorously tweak the feedback knobs on their delay units (eventually climaxing in a lake of pitch-bending saturation). Continuing the havoc, Vigroux and Bourne build the title track with epileptic arpeggiating pulses, marching band samples, stroked microphones and (turntable) needle-drops of Blues Rock and Chicago (the band). For "Have a Champignon", Vigroux shreds alongside high-pitched oscillating patch-chord fury; not necessarily the most awe-inspiring performances, but the spherical production turns the piece into a queasy merry-go-round you don't want to stop. Running the gamut, the plans — if there were any — before recording "La Reine Rouge Sang" must have included "let's rock like King Crimson, cheese up our LFO wheels like Cameo, noodle like Bernie Worrell and do our best Christian Marclay impersonations. Roll tape!"
Ignoring musical economy, Vigroux and Bourne prefer to free-fall through the abyss of freedom, never finding the bottom of this chasm, flitting to B to J then Z before you have a chance to figure out what A was. The duo's ability to work with loud, unhinged hot messes and turn them into something interesting is a true gift; broken and bruised, listeners will thank these sirs and ask for another.
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