Description
Three years after Pergélisol/Chorémanie, their first diptych album crossing post-punk radicalism and minimalist ambition, the quartet named after Maria Spelterini (an Italian tightrope walker who crossed the Niagara Falls on a wire several times in 1876) released a second record that transcends this delicate aesthetic balance and navigates well beyond/below rock and electronics.
When Pierre-Antoine Parois, Arthur de La Grandière (members of Papier Tigre), Meriadeg Orgebin and Nicolas Joubaud (members of Chausse Trappe) are not in the ranks of La Colonie de Vacances or deep in the dictionary, looking for album titles (“pareidolia” is the phenomenon where the brain creates optical illusions of familiar faces or shapes where there is only abstraction) they imagine the most radical vanishing points to their possessed “Drum & Drone”.
Alternately bewitching and heady, this new thirty-three-minute piece of post-krautrock with industrial accents and the allure of ritual music is born from the interaction of a drone and a rhythm evolving side by side, crossing, mixing and responding to each other before disappearing.
Paréidolie opens with near-silent purity, a held synthetic note posed alongside a skeletal beat. The sound spectrum gradually widens, multiplying little by little and combining electronic sources and textures until it generates dissonant sinusoidal vertigo punctuated by a turgid polyrhythm and supported by electric bursts; until the rupture, marked by a bell sound.
On the other side of the mirror, the silence is soon swept away by rustling modulations and convulsed electric feedbacks, slowly restoring a pulsating dynamic, like a negative vision of the first twenty minutes of the piece as one would hear it behind the red velvet curtain of David Lynch. The bell rings again, without stopping this time, and closes the piece with a discontinuous ringing restoring the initial purity.
A resolutely promising young project, Spelterini reconciles the rhythmic and textural rigor of the Austrian post-rockers of Radian with the regressive electric incantations of the Americans of Mosquitoes and signs a breathtaking piece evoking a strange ritual in a power plant.