Here’s a goodly spooksteroo drone art piece credited to Bruno Duplant, one of our favourite shape-heisting minimalists from France often associated with compositions of the long-form notional variety…time was he’d never be seen in public without an all-white record cover for his mysterious publications, probably dismayed when faced with the compromise of having messy typography disrupting the clean surface of the cardboard. But more recent forays have seen a return to recognisable images. Without checking, I seem to recall trees with bare twigs, and faces of people making an appearance, albeit said images were in a distressed and treated state. Loved his Écouter les Fantômes from 2024, indicating a healthy preoccupation with communicating with spirits from the dead, as befits all those of a surreal bent.
Today’s item Athanor (DISSIPATIO DISS039), all lower-case of course, does include grey and murky imagery from a hand-held camera which on back cover proves to be a tower block designed in the “brutalist” mode. Of course the die-hard metal fan would see this as an update on the fourth Led Zeppelin album gatefold cover, except we lack the man bearing his bundle of sticks on front cover. Well, Duplant is once again intent on covering his tracks, and gives us scant clues as to what he’s conjuring with his “magick organ” on these lengthy explorattos, apart from an elliptical poem and a short prose piece which reads like Edgar Allen Poe fed into the automatic grammulator. In attempting to express something about the unknowable inner spirit, the writer clutches at fleeting images – the walls of a chamber, light, flame, shadows. It might allude to the human capacity for inward contemplation, and the transformation of ideas into realities, but it’s hard to be sure when we lapse into more abstract terms such as silence, presence, and patience. Reminiscent of a monkish devotional life it be.
Some of these impressions may lead the listener to expect near-silent or uneventful music, but the first disc of Athanor is far from that; the accumulated organ sounds, and their electro-acoustic treatments, create blocky clouds and oppressive sheets of violet-black silver metal that, impossibly, hang in the air at the same time as they are building the solid walls of this “chamber made of attention”. It’s also far from comforting. In past climes, Bruno Duplant has produced near-spiritual utterances in his impressive variety of garden plantures, but this one disturbs the mind and ruffles the ocean of certainty, At one stroke, he takes on the entire “Dungeon Synth” splinter-genre of Black Metal and reinvents it on his own terms, producing something more ethereal, more underground, and more supernatural than a thousand cassettes imprinted with castles, gnomes and wizards on their engraved covers. It’s a compelling and cleansing experience, and the music seems to get right inside your body, inhabiting it, scrubbing your lungs and polishing your dorsal body cavity.
All of disc two of this supremo meister-caust is occupied by ‘Albedo’, a 36+ mins piece which uses the specific term applied to measure how reflective a surface is, and I only heard of it because of a science-fiction comic book I read as 12 year-old. The dilemma in the story is that Earth’s albedo had mysteriously turned very low, making our globe a menace to other planets because other space travellers could barely perceive it and might crash into it. As a result, well-meaning aliens arrived intent on destroying our near-invisible globe. For Bruno Duplant’s take on the ‘Albedo’ situation, I see he’s roped in a French musician called Golem Mecanique whose music I never hard before, but now want to investigate further sojourns from her catalogue of “experimental sacred music / dark churches / desert / drone void / occult and ghostly” vibrations. For one thing she’s made three albums for Ideologic Organ which somehow slipped passed our catchment logs. Well, this talented Karen Jebane (who also calls herself Abel Khan) plays the Boite à Bourdon built by the craftsman Léo Maurel, which is not unlike a hurdy-gurdy or Indian shruti-box, and she unleashes nine types of mayhem on ‘Albedo’ using this box. Be prepared for an intensive black wave of golden soot which washes over the body and pushes against the crowd, even flattening the torsos of larger men with barrel chests who set themselves up as human barricades in the protection layer. It’s also like having all the breath knocked out of your lungs, but in slow motion.
By now I feel like my comic book story is coming true, except it’s the entire human race whose quotient of reflectiveness is being reduced to zero. I’m happy to take such notions, and the entire record itself, as a powerful metaphor for the state of mankind today. It might not be a comforting message, but we need more artists to come forward and say the unsayable, and that modern life is on the brink of disaster, but it’s not due exclusively to wars, famine, financial ruin or global warming, and in fact things are much worse. From 27/03/2026.