Saboteur/Saboteur [Yves Botz & Roro Perrot]
Decimation Sociale. CD/DL
Quentin Rollet & Romain Perrot - L’impatience des Invisibles
Decimation Sociale. DSCDQR. CD/DL
Maginot/Maginot [Romain Perrot & Paul Hegarty]
Decimation Sociale. CD/DL
Olivier Bringer & Romain Perrot - Histories de la Nuit
Decimation Sociale. DSCDDOBRP. CD/DL
Vomir - Social Distancing
Decimation Sociale. DSCDVOMIRSD. CD/DL
Clov and Hamm, in Beckett’s Endgame, wind up an alarm clock and then listen to it ringing. When it stops Clov says: ‘The end is terrific!’ Hamm replies ‘I prefer the middle’.
I see the pubs are open again. These now being the places where you can get an alcoholic drink and some mediocre food in an atmosphere that more closely resembles an operating theatre only with more idiots and squashed chips in the carpet. I’ve been going off pubs for a while now and especially since the smoking ban, seeing how fag smoke was the only thing masking the smell of stale piss in the bogs and the body odour of your fellow drinkers. Not that I smoke anymore. Between the ages of sixteen and forty you couldn’t keep me out of pubs, now you’d have all on getting me in one. Like a lot of other things in life, they aint what they used to be. If the future of drinking in pubs is sitting in perspex square in a Wetherspoons, being table served by someone in a medical visor and rubber gloves I’ll stay at home smothering myself in Decimation Sociale releases instead. Much more pleasurable.
Romain Perrot’s label is a depository for things struggling to find a home elsewhere and I quite like that. Its a brave man that puts out a CD of two men shouting and screaming at each other over scrabbled acoustic guitars and randomly hit electronic equipment for forty five minutes but thats Saboteur do. Its a good place to start for a French label, the word ‘saboteur’ deriving from the French word ‘sabot’ these being wooden clogs that workers threw into their machines [probably during the Industrial Revolution] thus wrecking them in the process. We used hammers, the French used shoes, whatever it takes people. Its what Perrot and Botz are doing to their instruments, their voices and our delicate ears. A live track as recorded in Paris in 2019.
Its a similar set up for Perrot and Quentin Rollet with Rollet’s alto sax moving around Perrot’s lapping shortwave noise and unstable ambience. Rollet takes his horn apart, blows down the bell, clacks the keys and generally matches what Perrot is creating with [judging by the sleeve] a vast array of electrical equipment, keyboards and the effluvium of Parisian flea markets. Things take a turn for the savage on ‘Sans Aveu’ where electronically treated vocals from Perrot makes him sound like a cross between a Dalek and the singer from Bolt Thrower before Rollet does his best Albert Ayler impersonation on ‘La Tradition est une Trahison’. These juxtapositions of sax and all out synth blurt making for an ear opening experience. Last track ‘Embrocation Siamoise’ blossoms like a 70’s era Tangerine Dream opening. This is no bad thing.
When Perrot teams up with Paul Hegarty on Maginot the mood turns more industrial with another live recording as laid down in Paris and Hambourg. Its two central tracks being awash in tape noise and electro-acoustic clatter as first an American radio advertisement and then a call to a car insurance company are distorted and muffled to create disturbing atmospheres. This not unlike many an Illusion of Safety release with mundane conversation replacing the transgressive themes of serial killer confessions and the reminiscences of those who survived extreme torture. The last track here being a one minute and fourteen second ambient homage to Edgar Froese.
The most disturbing and challenging release of the five sees Perrot team up with Olivier Bringer whose vocal technique lies somewhere between the out-there workings of Ludo Mich and the terrified screams of a demented lunatic. Rarely have I experienced such ferocious deaf screams but there they are mingled in with simpleton gibberish and the noodly random synth plod of Perrot, as if a feeble minded idiot was giving an account of their troubled life while suffering agonising flashbacks capable of reducing them to intermittent, rigid terror. No track titles are given but I did catch the word ‘desolet’ sobbed over and over. At times Bringer sounds like a demonic succubus, at other like Papa Lazarous. Track four dissolves into the barely audible, just the merest of synth and Bringer mumbling to himself by track five he’s sounding like a crow.
At least Vomir is doing the sensible thing by covering up. A black bin liner should repel even the most determined virus though getting around might prove difficult. The zeitgeist has been captured by the Harsh Noise Wall maestro, who I’m assuming is Perrot himself. Harsh Noise Walls though ... its been a long time. An hours worth of unwavering mid-range electronic cacophony delivered with enough low-end crunch to give it that clenched fist, bent elbow, curled lip, gurned face oomph. The volume is entirely up to you of course. I prefer mine at number four with headphones on. The opportunities for playing this at high volume sans 'phones being negligible should I wish to remain on speaking terms with Mrs Fisher to say nothing of the neighbours and if I do the same with headphones I loose all nuance. Maybe its my headphones? I do tip the toe into the noise waters occasionally though I'd never choose a Wall Noise release. For noise to work there has to be a dynamic, a shift in tension, lows as well as highs and Harsh Noise Walls doesn't give me that. Losing yourself in that maelstrom is all well and good but it's a largactyl versus speed, sledgehammer v chisel, shipping tanker v Ferrari, Liberace v Debussy, old pubs versus new pubs contest. Which is no contest at all.
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