*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.