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Sun Stabbed

In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (LP)

Label: Doubtful Sounds

Format: LP

Genre: Experimental

In stock

€17.90
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This LP shows the band doing their improv feedback guitar drone in a more precise way than before. Of course it’s still related to NZ music : Surface of the Earth, The Dead C and all guitars projects from there, but also to guitar noise minimalism from the USA, Glen Branca, Tony Conrad et.al. but also salutes the godmother of French experimental music Eliane Radigue.

*2022 Stock. Limited edition of 300 copies. Includes 2 postcards.* The palindrome seems increasingly to be the only literary trope that can convey the insanity of modern life. As we circle ever closer to the global plug hole, the title of this album - taken from Guy Debord’s final film - is a Latin joke that likens us to moths attracted to a flame, circling in darkness and consumed by fire. This is a detournement whose time has well and truly come, and the opening salvo of this record is a siren-like wail of feedback that immediately conveys the feeling of global emergency. That this record also tips its hat to the glacial noise guitar of those antipodean cosmonauts Surface Of The Earth merely adds to the underlying frisson of ecological catastrophe. At this juncture I should make a statement of interest. This French duo, here presenting their second self-released album, took their name from a Dead C record, but their reference points are firmly in the 1990’s second wave of New Zealand guitar explorers - RST, Thela and K Group. Their stock in trade is the slow unwinding of feedback, transitioning imperceptibly through harmonic steps, beating against itself in slow swells and recessions of howling stasis. But always gauzy, not gutsy ; elegiac rather than agressive. This is a lament for a truly human project that is being crushed beneath the juggernaut wheels of spectacle.
Thierry Monnier and Pierre Faure, the duo that comprise Sun Stabbed, can play this long slow game to perfection. Like tantric intercourse, it’s all about holding back, not letting out. Walls of solid guitar move in stately hieratic dances across paved courtyards laid down when philosophy was still young. The vibe is Popol Vuh for the era of climate emergency, it celebrates the eternity of cosmos but also lays out the incident tape around the scenes of crime : climate change, inequality, fascism. This music is simultaneously geological and provisional, reflective and tocsin-sounding. As the final track "Voilà Donc Une Civilisation Qui Brûle, Chavire Et S’Enfonce Toute Entière" says it, our "Civilisation Is Burning, Capsizing And Sinking Outright". As the band still play on the poop deck, we must ignore these inconvenient facts any longer.  - Bruce Russell / The Wire Magazine Issue 446. April 2021
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Details
Cat. number: doubt 20
Year: 2020
Notes:

Recorded at Studio A (Grenoble), 3rd and 4th July 2019 Sleeve by Octobre.

A feast of manipulated feedback, burned-out wreckage, and simmering dronesRead more

It has been roughly a decade since this French duo of gnarled guitar enthusiasts last surfaced as Sun Stabbed and I have certainly missed them, though Thierry Monnier and Pierre Faure's similarly excellent La Morte Young project helped fill the void nicely. Aside from the different line-ups, the main difference between the two projects is that this one is kind of a direct homage to some of New Zealand's most iconic purveyors of blacked drones and noisy guitars.

While no discussion of that subject would be complete without Campbell Kneale, it is The Dead C and the woefully underheard Surface of the Earth that explicitly provide the most inspiration here. Characteristically, Monnier and Faure are admirably up to the task of continuing that fine tradition, as In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a feast of manipulated feedback, burned-out wreckage, and simmering drones. Occasionally it can be eerily beautiful and haunting, but I also like the parts that resemble an onstage brawl between Skullflower and Sunn O))). This is an instant noise/drone guitar classic."

- Brainwashed