Marble, lasagne, lego, moon, liquorice, sap, weightlessness... These are all words and their associated sensations that come to mind when I think of the music of Société Etrange and more precisely to this brand new album mysteriously named "Chance". To tell the truth, it's lucky that this trip exists.
The German groove of Can, the ghostly haze of Phew and the industrial elasticity of African Head Charge. All this and more. Société Etrange is an entity, it's a name and a sound. A compact and precise sound, chiselled, worked, handcrafted as one would dig with a knife as one would meticulously carve DNA chains in an avocado pit with a penknife. Analogue electronics rubs shoulders with and marries the digital, the electric and the acoustic, without pose, in a great welcoming procession that could go round and round for hours, It's so enjoyable to undulate your pelvis in it, under hypnosis.
In each of the compositions that punctuate this "Chance" the development of the music never seeks to take advantage of easy effects, drops, or the like. The music never tries to take advantage of easy effects, drops, trowel relays, invasive percussion or raunchy sounds. It's the opposite, everything is done on tiptoe. It is the latent sensuality, the autonomy of the motifs and the economy of their deployment of their deployment that makes these sounds so addictive and bewitching. The music hovers over our heads like a big silver scroll, lascivious and sensual. During the band's concerts, it is in a luminous but no less creeping communion that expresses a joyfulness of bodies suspended in a time other than the one that is imposed on us every day.
Yes, it is this double movement that this music allows. Dancing, undulating but also abysmal and meditative. It tells us something about our world, its entrails and these three musicians who have been sculpting this material for years, criss-crossing the roads of Europe to evangelise our ears, like Strangonite representatives.