Les Marquises : Lost Lost Lost
Only Ghosts / La Terra Trema / Sound And Fury /
This Carnival Of Lights / Comme Nous Brûlons / Terrible Horses
In
2008, the french poly-instrumentalist Jean-Sébastien Nouveau was busy
promoting the second album of his band, Immune. Cleverly blending jazz,
post-rock and crisp electronics to the aesthetics of Hood and Mark
Hollis, Not Until Morning
(2008), an hymn to slowness, melancholy and daydreaming, got plenty of nice
press reviews. But very soon afterwards, Jean-Sébastien felt like something
heavier and more intense where drums and keyboards would be central. In order
to do so, he invited his friend, the drummer Jonathan Grandcollot, to
bring even more density to the project. The theme of the Lp, will impose itself
quite naturally, after Jean-Sébastien visited the Art Brut Museum in Lausanne,
where he discovered the capital work of Henry Darger (1892-1973), a
loner, who worked most of his life as a toilet attendant in a hospital in
Chicago. After his death, was found in his crammed room, Realms Of The
Unreal, a sort of graphic novel made of 13 handbound volumes of large and
very haunting watercolours, depicting the epic adventures of The Vivian Girls,
seven nubile sisters leading a ruthless and bloody uprising against the adults
engaged in child-slavery ! Lost Lost Lost has been directly
inspired from Darger's work. All that
was left, was to find a singer…
Lots
of nasty things have been said about the nebula, Internet. Whatever, but no one
can't deny that it allows collaborations that woud not have happened otherwise.
Very fond of the skin-deep music of american band, Minus Story, and particularly of their fourth Lp, No
Rest For Ghosts (2005), like with a message in a bottle, Jean-Sébastien
contacted the band's singer Jordan
Geiger, offering him to sing on compositions that were already impregnated
with the fascinating atmosphere of Darger's work – the art of switching from
dream to nightmare and from peacefulness to despair – not a million miles away
from Minus Story's own mixture. To his big surprise, Geiger agreed to
participate. Soon, like digital spirits, voices and instrumentals travelled on
the Net, back and forth, many times. Finally the trio found itself a name : Les Marquises, echoing the profound
loneliness of an artist that nobody had set foot in the room until his death,
and the chosen exile of Belgian singer Jacques
Brel (who was awaiting his) retired in these polynesian islands, from which
he penned his very last Lp, Les Marquises
(1997) – a record that Jean-Sébastien used to listen to quite a lot when he
was in the pre-production stage.
Recorded
at home, in the D.I.Y way and with the help of a few friends, Lost Lost Lost slowly took form, then like a ghost arised
and materialised out of melodic haze. As soon as the first bars, one is
immediately caught by the whirlwind of drums that opens Only Ghosts, startled by
the peculiar pitch of Geiger's voice, who sounds like Edgar Allan Poe
reincarnated in Tom Yorke, and by a raving section of strangled horns,
recalling the energetic madness that transpired out of the Jazz Composer's
Orchestra's Escalator Over The Hill
(1971), whereas the lyrics remind the deranged atmosphere of The Hapless Child (1975), an Lp of the
austrian trumpet player Michael Mantler (with Robert Wyatt) based on the deranged and cruel tales of Edward Gorey (Sound
And Fury, Carnival Of Lights). Just like in a Tim Burton movie, here,
darkness is meant to be enjoyable, the uneasyness, pleasant. As eloquent as the
songs themselves, the couple of instrumentals, are either skewed with digital
drizzle, crackle and scratches (La Terra Trema) or underligned by
haunting and feverish strings (Comme Nous Brûlons). On the verge of
ambient, they are cleverly laid out, in order to invite the listener to pause,
to use one's imagination, wander in the rich soundscapes and perhaps also to
make the acquaintance of the iconoclast's work at : http://www.hammergallery.com/Artists/darger/Darger.htm
Intelligently
combining the pop atmospherics of Immune with the more tortured ones of Minus
Story, the (free)jazz overtones of this new blend – in tune with the poetic alienation
of Darger's work – will prove one of the most delicious way of feeling Lost Lost Lost, in a challenging and
adventurous musical environment, that nevertheless, won't loose you on its way
!
Marc Gourdon