"Noir" is the first studio album of the bleakly imaginative trio Marteau Rouge (French for "Red Hammer"), consisting of Makoto Sato on drums, Jean-Marc Foussat on VSC 11 and vocals and the talented guitar player Jean-Francois Pauvros (former collaborator of proper miliar stones of noise scene such as Sonic Youth and Keiji Haino), after their brilliant live recording with legendary free-improvisational saxophone player Evan Parker, whose absence on this record gives this amazing ensemble the possibility to brandish their abrasively jazzy and remarkably atmospheric sound. Some titles could be somehow deceptive: for instance, you could expect that a track whose name is "Sur une balancoire" ("On a teeter-totter") would sound somehow playful and it could be in a certain sense even if it could surmise more the anguished tribulation of a duck which is cognizant of the fact that it's going to be turned into fois gras as Makoto's metallic hits are closer to the sinister noise a fanatical butcher could make by sharpening and hitting his set of knives, and the following "A la fete" could mirror the inner sounds of the inhibited day-dreaming of bloodthirsty misanthropist in the middle of a mundane party at worst, but their talent in moulding noise is undeniable and reaches its peaks on the gradual electrical saturation of the turbulent "Entre..." and the sinister wonky melodies and the heady percussive flaying of the final title-track. Menacingly astounding.