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Rating: For those missing Blood Axis and needing to drink from the ungenerous source of Michael Moynihan (father of the only immense Gospel and a few partial other appearances called to quench the thirst of an insatiable craving), I recommend savoring this "Absinthe - La Folie Verte" from 2001, a strange operation born from the collaboration of the Axis with Les Joyaux de la Princesse, a French industrial act active since 1986 and revolving around the figure of Erik Konofal (notable "Ostenbraun", from 1989: the succulent collaboration with Death in June).
"Absinthe - La Folie Verte" (also known as: "Absinthe - The Green Madness"), in its surreal noir-cabaret tones, evokes the undefined contours of a dark and smoky Paris of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century: its dark streets, its foul suburbs, worlds teeming with derelict existences abandoned by God's grace. But the recreated scenarios actually outline a mental city that could easily be Raskolnikov's St. Petersburg or Jack the Ripper's London: an ideal, putrid, invisible city, a mirror of the soul; a night recreated by the fumes of alcohol, by the pains, worries, and existential anxieties that infest the artistic and human path of Moynihan.
Just hearing his gruff voice, right after hitting the play button, makes quite an impression, so rare are his forays into the record world: the vocal charisma of the grim singer (mostly launched in terrible recitations) and the blurred industrial brushstrokes of Konofal (under the careful supervision of Robert Ferbrache) form the appreciability of a work that aims to illustrate the prodigious qualities of absinthe (Moynihan's oratory framework is based on excerpts from more or less known French authors, all dedicated to the beverage celebrated here): a smoky, visionary, dreamlike, surreal, threatening, esoterically alcoholic, unscrupulously elitist work.
The sinuous and serpentine violin of the brilliant Annabel Lee completes a sonic devastation picture, where a derelict ambient psychedelia merges with an inconsistently symphonic substrate, as happened in the monumental Gospel (paradigmatic is "Between Birds of Prey", a fundamental passage of the Axis' masterpiece and the imprint on which the entire work evolves).
Even though, in reality, the journey originates from much further away: from the psychic disintegration and existential dramas showcased in the exhausting "Wall of Sacrifice" by the always essential Death in June; or from the effervescent irreverence of "Music, Martinis and Misantrophy" released under the name Boyd Rice & Friends (where Moynihan and Ferbrache also contributed).
And precisely in the just-mentioned work (there was the Martini, here the absinthe) the greatest similarities are found, especially at a thematic level, as well as stylistically.
Finally, about the language used, the lesson of NoN is undeniable: the same frightening orchestrations, broken and repeated in dreadful loops that seem endless; the same sound constructions that see the ruthless overlap of crackling and time-rotted tapes; the same claustrophobic settings rendered by the pitiless fusion of contrasting elements (another deadly weapon, always a founding characteristic of the Axis' artistic production), generating devastated and ruinous landscapes.
"La Follia Verde" is a unique, confused, sensual journey, where the tracks fade into each other seamlessly: between a quotation (recognizable to the attentive ear, the reprisal of the theme of the famous "Reign I Forever" in "Variations sur le Thème de Corelli"), and a white-weapon assault (the chilling noise crescendo of the massive "Princesse Verte"), the 52 minutes that characterize the work flow over our ears like a dense and sticky mixture that's hard to shake off. A perverse ambient electronic combines with pressing neoclassical scores, mournful untuned orchestras (a worthy soundtrack of the ongoing apocalypse) and the solemn warbling of tenors and sopranos, creating an atmosphere of dreamlike terror that aims to recreate the visions and hallucinations given by the (ab)use of absinthe. And it is precisely through "the green madness" that yet another escape from humanity is accomplished, told to us by Moynihan's grave voice, a singer of a mental process that carries Nietzschean traits in metaphorically representing the practice of elevating the Self, beyond any moral, ethical, religious, social principle.
In simpler terms, this album is a real kick in the balls: Moynihan's misanthropy finds its full sublimation here, in a work that presents itself to the ear as the apotheosis of the Extreme, the absolute affirmation of the primacy of the Irrational and a conception of art based on intransigence and the total absence of compromise.
Happy hangover to everyone!
Tracklist
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