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Joëlle Vinciarelli

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Talweg, “Des tourments si grands” (Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers!, 2022)

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This is my first deep immersion into Joëlle Vinciarelli & Eric Lombaert’s deeply unconventional “free metal” duo, but I have long been a fan of the pair’s noise/drone band La Morte Young (as well as Vinciarelli’s repeat collaborations with My Cat is an Alien). Notably, there is absolutely nothing recognizably “metal” about this latest release, as the closest kindred spirits are probably outer limits psychonauts like the LAFMS milieu or Borbetomagus. However, even those signposts are inadequate at conveying how far Talweg have descended into their own personal rabbit hole with this album, as these four pieces feel both unstuck in time and decidedly pagan/occult-inspired (which makes sense, given Vinciarelli’s passion for collecting unusual and ancient instruments). 

Further muddying the waters, this album arguably captures the duo in “soundtrack mode,” as two of the pieces are early/rehearsal versions of pieces composed for a Monster Chetwynd exhibition, while a third borrows a nursery rhyme from Marcel Hanoun’s “Le Printemps” as its central theme. While “rehearsals for an exhibition soundtrack” admittedly does not sound all that appealing on paper, these recordings are quite compelling in reality, as Des tourments si grands often feels like a remarkably inspired and deeply unconventional stab at outsider free jazz. Fans of Vinciarelli’s work with MCIAA will definitely want to investigate this one, as it journeys into similarly alien territory, but the addition of Lombaert’s killer drumming takes that aesthetic in a far more explosive and visceral direction.

The album is divided into four separate longform pieces that always extend for at least fifteen minutes of shapeshifting psychotropic magic. Picking a favorite is damn near impossible, as every single piece eventually gets somewhere wonderful, but my current feeling is that the closing “où l’on souffre, des tourments si grands que…” is the highlight that best captures the duo at the height of their powers. It initially calls to mind a duet between a free jazz drummer and an orchestra of demonic air raid sirens, but the howling maelstrom is soon further enhanced by the sing-song nursery rhyme at its heart, resulting in something that sounds like a somnambulant French Vashti Bunyan loopingly intoning the same lines over and over again inside a gnarled extradimensional nightmare. 

Somehow the piece only gets better from there, as a descending chord progression and a stomping, crashing beat take shape as Vinciarelli unleashes a viscerally feral-sounding trumpet solo. Notably, it is the only piece on the album where I can hear any real trace of the pair’s metal inspirations, as it feels like a heavy doom metal jam played on the wrong instruments (coupled with a pointed avoidance of all genre tropes, of course). In short, it rules, but the other three songs all come quite close to scaling similarly lofty heights.

In the opener, for example, Talweg approximate an unholy mash-up of ancient pagan bell ceremony, lysergic aviary, supernaturally possessed music box, and a Siren luring me through an ambient fog towards the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. Elsewhere, “comme une éponge, que l’on plonge” initially kicks off in similar “strangled, uneasily viscous-sounding ceremonial trumpet meets free jazz drumming” territory, but then dissolves into a wonderfully simmering groove of buzzing, psychotropic drones and a skittering, off-kilter beat enlivened with wild, virtuosic fills before reigniting for a gloriously volcanic finale. 

The remaining piece, “dans un gouffre, plein de soufre,” is yet another top-tier mindfuck, gradually evolving from “droning harmonium sea shanty” to “gently undulating ambient/noir-jazz psychedelia” to “roaring extradimensional nightmare storm” en route to an unexpectedly meditative coda that sounds like a train slowly chugging its way through a phantasmagoric landscape of raining crystals. The one caveat, of course, is that this album is quite a challenging, dissonant, and intense ride, but that should be welcome terrain for fans of the duo’s other activities and Talweg are extremely fucking good at what they do. It is a real treat to encounter such otherworldly beauty and heady psychedelia delivered with white-knuckled elemental power and masterfully controlled violence.

Sounds can be found here.

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My Cat Is An Alien & Joëlle Vinciarelli, “Eternal Beyond III” (Elliptical Noise/Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers!, 2021)

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This is the third and final installment of the Opalio brothers’ wild and oft-brilliant collaborations with Talweg/La Morte Young’s Joëlle Vinciarelli, as “according to arcane, ancient cultures, sometimes things must come to an end to be ‘Eternal.'” While something wonderful tends to happen just about every single time these three artists convene, this Arthur Rimbaud-inspired installment is the one that the Opalios personally consider the best of the series (at the moment, at least). 

I do not think I could choose a favorite album from the trilogy, but the opening “Eternal Fanfare for the Warriors” is definitely one of my favorite MCIAA-related pieces to date. While the trio are currently unsure whether the conclusion of the trilogy is their collaborative swansong or just one phase in their continuing evolution, they can safely lay claim to having conjured some of the most visceral and unique sounds to reach my ears in recent memory. Vinciarelli’s intensity and unusual collection of instruments is a perfect foil (and grounding force) for the Opalios’ otherworldly psychedelia.

This album combines two separate sessions recorded in Vinciarelli’s studio in the French Alps, which is notable because 2018’s two-part “Eternal Éternité” was spontaneously composed in a very different world than “Eternal Fanfare for the Warriors” (which dates from May 2020). On one level, that makes a lot of sense, as “Eternal Fanfare” has a certain go-for-broke intensity that befits such dark and troubling times, yet that interpretation cannot hold up in light of the similarly feral second half of “Eternal Éternité.” 

In any case, both pieces are memorable for both their volcanic ferocity and their expanded sound palette (as far out as they are, the Opalios’ vision inarguably features some eternally recurring and instantly recognizable elements). In the case of “Eternal Fanfare,” however, the expected space ritual features a big surprise in the form of strangled trumpet squawking from Vinciarelli (along with some similarly unexpected sleigh bells from Maurizio). It is the exquisite feel of an ancient war procession passing through a rip in the dimensional fabric for a hissing, bleary, and lysergically smeared adventure into the unknown.

Naturally, the first half “Eternal Éternité” offers no respite at all from the cosmic phantasmagoria, as the album only becomes more of a harrowing mindfuck and there are no longer any friendly or familiar sounds like trumpets and sleigh bells to provide solid ground: just fifteen unnerving and unrepentant minutes of howling, dissonantly harmonized drones rising and falling. As radical art, it is admittedly impressive, but I prefer the more human-sounding terrain of the second half (like the dissonance-averse coward that I am). 

“Eternal Éternité (Pt. 2)” initially returns to more traditional alien fare (Roberto’s wordless vocalizations, spacey electronics, and something that sounds like an out-of-tune zither), but Vinciarelli soon joins in with some vocal drones akin to Tuvan throat singing. As the layers accumulate, however, it blossoms into something that resembles an even more nightmarish version of Tarkovsky’s Solaris in which the protagonist violently scrabbles at a piano soundboard while being sucked into a roiling maelstrom of static. In short, great stuff (as always). While I am not sure I have a strong enough constitution to revisit the first part of “Eternal Éternité” any time soon, Eternal Beyond III handily meets my criteria for prime My Cat is an Alien: a pair of great pieces, a few new stylistic elements, and the kind of mind-melting deep space cacophony that only the Opalios can channel.

Samples can be found here.