Bohren & der Club of Gore
Sunset Mission

Over time, I have developed almost an obsession with crafting the perfect soundtrack for my miserable life. The resulting film would undoubtedly be fecal, but one thing on which critics could never, ever find fault - modestly - would be the musical accompaniment I have selected. A handful of more or less majestic records to backdrop a series of events that range from the best banal to the worst stupid, yet trivial. I would play Sunset Mission when I get in the car on a winter evening, heading for an almost endless journey along the highways swallowed by darkness. About two or three hours after the crepuscular metropolitan landscape depicted on the cover.

Sunset Mission saw the light of day five years after the previous Midnight Radio (Epistrophy, 1995), a period during which B&DCOG underwent a radical change that would influence everything they would do subsequently. The defection of guitarist Reiner Henseleit, replaced by the multi-instrumentalist - but primarily saxophonist - Christoph Clöser, indeed contributed to definitively breaking the (few) ties the group's sound still maintained with the doom roots of the beginnings, triggering a more decisive shift towards an almost Badalamentian dark jazz - not Gaetano, the other! - (yet deprived of the emotional surges that characterize the production of the author of some of the most memorable soundtracks ever), distantly related to the more reflective Supersilent.

The structure of the pieces becomes extremely rarefied, with clear references to John Cage's experiments in the importance given to the very absence of sound, here more than ever part of the quartet's expressive code. The balance among the instruments remains intact and unchanged for the entire duration of the album, among keyboard layers, drum beats well beyond the concept of downtempo with brushed snare drum, and consistent double bass chords, in a long jam that slips away like the night. In this context, Clöser's tenor sax remains the point of reference, which with its dark lines manages alone to give the album its very peculiar noir atmosphere - an adjective that recurs whenever this album is mentioned, and not by chance.

Because this album reminds me - more than the golden age of film noir, to be clear Bogart's period - of the twilight of noir masterfully painted by Robert Altman in the masterful The Long Goodbye (1973), a free cinematic adaptation of Chandler's book of the same name. If Altman belatedly celebrated the end of an entire way of making cinema by revamping the noir styles that were in vogue thirty years earlier, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore create the perfect soundtrack for such an epilogue, almost forty years late.

In front of my eyes, I have Elliott Gould's Marlowe, a character born of an era - the smoky 1930s America - where murkiness is not yet universal (although latent even in the hearts of the "good guys" themselves), a hero despite himself tossed into a world - the post-hippie '70s Los Angeles - that now revels in corruption. From here comes Marlowe's inability to be integrated into the environment in which he moves, ending up wandering alienated like a modern Don Quixote - the archetype of the misfit. A bit like this album, I dare say unique in its genre. I envision him putting on Sunset Mission and downing a bottle of brandy accompanied by a pack of Camels in the solitude of the American night. I see him losing himself and never returning to his steps, marking once and for all the end of an era. He will forgive me if I, a Mr. Nobody, dared to choose his final soundtrack - but in any case, I think he will appreciate it because as long as he continues to listen to this album, he will never stop smoking, nor drinking.