*300 copies limited edition* The powdered-nosed Escampette, a devil, steps out of the reserve he once assigned himself with the complicity of the warder. In his new recipe book he deciphers for us several ways of inhabiting the night, that refuge running beneath the day, and, by brushing it, draws the map of paths winding between woods and thickets where strange trumpets grow. It is in their coppery foliage that he cools the fire of his cheeks.

In constant molt, the devil knows when and how to turn the page and turns it once more, pushing deeper the archaeology of his subterranean states and movements thanks to the renewed precision of his instruments. Polyrhythms of shells and hollow trunks, small microphones picking up through the floorboards the dances of springy hooves, clashes of very old censers. Flayed, globular synthesizers, like flutes drawn from an alembic, underground fires’ buzzings, raspings of non-human entities.

Each track is a miniaturist tableau animated by sonorous characters on sabbatical leave, whose moaning laughs, whispers and stomps accompany the singing and the magnetic silences of the devil our guide. The tone is set at the opening of the record (A1): the tape recorder engages, stutters, then a trembling melody leads us straight into a night streaked with bizarre birds and paced by the breath of a catfish sleeping under the silt. From this primordial stew emerges a Rose of Jericho, that flower which it shares with sounds and dreams in that it can remain dry and intact for centuries, as if waiting for whoever finally wakes it and sees it the next moment vanish into dust.

Thus there are eleven enveloping modulations, eleven nocturnal stations, eleven formulas of personal alchemy that the devil offers us here, skillfully evading any identification with a given genre or mode. If one sometimes thinks one hears the echo of invented traditions, it is to better slip into a strange bacchanalian cumbia, the soundtrack to a succulent ceremony in which one hallucinates the meal of an entire blackbird (A3). The strings of an old violin, the devil’s fetish, seem to rasp from the deserted backstage of a mountain den at the bear festival (A5); cracklings of butterfly wings that make the light shiver punctuate the dream soaked with love (A6).

The second side will be as dark as it is danceable. It opens on an almost cartoonish groove accompanied by the rhythm of a stubborn clock, and the little bird hammering the hour warns us of the oil spill that lies in wait (B1). On listening to the following song (B2), a head-banger from a topsy-turvy world, hands grow sweaty and reflexively seek to grab the nearest cup, following that mouth which says mouth. Under the effect of such a dark liquor, one witnesses a kind of infection of the landscape whose reliefs become swelled bumps and festering pustules, as if black thoughts and the blackness of the world conspired to rot the very earth (B3). Each time, however, the devil suggests how to transmute the day’s nightmare into liberating night: through trance, rhythm, dance. So too the irresistible beat of the penultimate song (B4), like a locomotive whose heart would be an engine, which makes us recover breath and a step light enough to leave the night.

Along this tortuous path Occitan brushes against French, sobriety with drunkenness, acid with base, death with desire. For the night, that fluid running beneath the day, is made of a liquid that galvanizes everything bathed in it. Just like the devil himself it endlessly changes there, everything dies and is reborn, everything polarizes into desires and hauntings. The scoria and clots of the real swept into a purgatorial bourrée dissolve there, and riddles find in those soft labyrinths streaked with flashes their impossible solution.