:zoviet*france:
Collusion

Half a second, maybe less, a dull noise... jesus christ... I WAS JIM JONES ATTORNEY... the voice of an American preacher towers in the silence, the sermon discusses the mass suicides at Jonestown, there is no trace of music, not yet, the voice grows in theatrical intensity to the point of reaching almost a paroxysm, increasingly emphatic, frenzied. Some kind of sound begins to insinuate itself, creeping like a snake, almost subliminal, FOLLOW JESUS!...FOLLOW JESUS! the crowd of believers murmurs in approval while a chasm opens at my feet. A dirty and shapeless mass of sound sucks everything in, noises, echoing reverberations of what seem to be completely devastated string instruments, immersed in a low-fi acidic bath made of tape manipulations and primitive concrete music, the overall effect is wonderfully terrifying. All this is "Ram," one of the most anxiety-inducing and disastrous tracks ever to appear on a record, that's for sure, presented at the beginning of this album, which is nothing but a collection of tracks released on various compilations between 1983 and 1990, they are Zoviet France.
Zoviet France, an underground post-industrial cult, (Ben Ponton, Robin Storey, and other collaborators of the caliber of Mark Spybey just to name one) released in their golden era a slew of extraordinary records, a totally personal and unique music, full of ethnic, psychedelic, noise, and tribal suggestions, loaded with a deflagrating and expressionist emotionality, born of recording techniques borrowed from musique concrète, tape manipulation, found sound, processing of musical instruments' sounds (whether traditional, self-built, or ethnic) often making them unrecognizable.
If "Ram" placed at the start is highlighted as one of the most chilling and frightening compositions ever conceived, then "White Dusk" about halfway through the tracklist might as well rank among the most genius and hermetic things ever conceived, though, in truth, losing very little during its over 16 minutes in total of the gloominess of the opening track, you find yourself faced with an ultra-expressionist meta-sonic collage, WHITHE DUSK...LET GO... a severe vocal sample resounds laid on sinister feeble sounds, that often touch upon silence, they could be as much bells as iron pipes on metal plates, the developments of the track become increasingly unpredictable and ingenious, between sections built solely on an electronically filtered breath to noisier parts, repetitions of vocal samples assembled in a circular fashion and psychoactive electroacoustic vortices.
The rest of the collection moves through the dark territories of the unconscious, between the stunning and subdued unease of "First Vigil," the deviant and ancestral rituals of "Le Mur Mûr Nu," the ferocious and rotten industrial noise clump of "Sprey," and finally the insane "Something This Beautiful" and "Fugitive" to seal it all in magmatic, delirious, and tight mystical and freeform cut-ups, amidst disconcerting sounds, fragments of classical music, and a totally disintegrated emotionality.
VIVA LA FRANCIA SOVIETICA.