L’Eau Des Fleurs is a new-ish record label in Paris set up by Félix Gatier. He specialises in vinyl releases only, curating a small but highly select and eclectic catalogue. From his own doigts he did send us the 2023 LP by Los Lichis, a French-Mexican band, and I’m greatly looking forward to writing about that freakoid of outsider genius if I am spared the years and if I can find the words. To further indicate Gatier’s poetic credentials, might I add that he devised his label name in tribute to an experimental novel written by the French poet Jean-Michel Reynard, about which Jacques Dupin has stated “We can only let ourselves be carried away, let ourselves be covered, let ourselves be caught in its laces, in its stuffiness, in the traps that are its truth. The test is rough but, from the exclusion that it assigns, its provocation, its magnetism begins to work. A reading, a second reading, and repeated immersions in the text irrigate unsuspected strata in us.” Phew!
Well, if you want more of your unsuspected strata irrigated in that way, turn ye to Mirrors (eaudesfleurs001), today’s vinyl LP credited to Michael Morley and Michel Henritzi, and the very first release on this label. A very extreme record of guitar noise it be…Morley has been producing unique free-form swamps of desolate wails since 1987 as part of The Dead C in New Zealand, and also solo as Gate since 1989 (although Lee Ranaldo naturally sought him out, and he did make a memorable record with another Sonic Youther Kim Gordon as Body / Gate / Head in around 2013). We have heard Henritzi in solo and duo mode many times before, and here he is with his trusty lap-steel monster, yet rarely has he been shunted and motorised to such extreme zones before in a performing context – evidently the New Zealand half of the act (here credited simply with “electric guitar”) plays for keeps and expects all who follow to ride the same tiger and bury the hatchet in the same swarm of giant moths. “Electric guitar” doesn’t begin to describe the intensity of the amplified volume nor the depths of the grotesque distortion going down here, so productive and informed by relentless “gigantism” that even Kevin Le Quellec and Julien Louvet, the engineers who did the mixing and mastering, both waved white flags from their bunkers and sent about 15 urgent faxes to L’Eau Des Fleurs in Paris, questioning the wisdom of this enterprise, but to no avail.
As to what a “Mirror” may be, a team of physicists are working on the problem as we speak, but it may have something to do with the pool of quicksilver murk that we see on the cover of this brutal record. As to the connection between these two players, one’s French and the other one wants to be, they’re both named with variants of the saint who led the army of God and defeated Lucifer a million times over, and are both connected to the life force of the universe by a thin skein of psychic energy which they’re capable of releasing back into the world, when connected to a suitable electrical socket. From 4th September 2023 and already sold out.