La Part Maudite

2010 release ** Despite the name suggesting some literary influence, the music of La Part Maudite, when listened to, hits you right in the gut. Likely inspired by an essay by Georges Bataille, who wrote under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, the music is direct, unsettling the senses like the soundtrack of an upcoming film, foreshadowing its scenes of debauchery as well as its moments of false respite, in some nocturnal alleyway where danger oozes. As in most of Bataille's narratives, however, the music doesn't make you forget that darkness can exist alongside the most innocent games. Here, after all, is a band that revels in unleashing the forces of distortion like children playing around with their arsenal of little chemists. The result teeters in a fertile zone of discomfort: if there is a marked taste here for textures and soundscapes, it is also to deliver them with an uninhibited swagger reminiscent of rock, punk, festive jam sessions: enough to reconcile, in short, directness with abstraction, guts with intellect, and anguish with pleasure — not forgetting the humor, present everywhere, and which proves, if it really had to be done, that La Part Maudite hopes that you will take as much pleasure in listening to its music as it takes pleasure in playing it, between two candlelit nights, meditating on the blasphemous phantasmagorias of Georges Bataille. It's the 8th publication - out of 24, one for each hour of a day - produced by &records (Michel F. Côté & Fabrizio Gilardino).