In stock
LP
OPERA MORT
“Le Présent”
Èlg & Jo Tanz’s hard-to-classify project Opéra Mort has been in operation since early moves on Jo Tanz’s tanzprocess label paved the way for a 2010 split release with the legendary Smegma, a cult pair of Reines D’Angleterre sides with august outsider Ghédalia Tazartès, and beguiling works for Luke Younger’s Alter label. On their new album ‘Le Présent’ they typically keep everything ambiguously out-of-reach and etheric in forms comparable to experimental ambient musick, electro-acoustic minimalism, and outsider psych-folk, never fully tilting to any of them, preferring a style of shapeshifting that works beautifully well on the back of calm, shut eyelids.
Through a process of improvisation, active listening, and highly attuned intuition, Opéra Mort proceed to induce hypnotic states of mind that encourage the imagination to wander, following a labyrinthine breadcrumb trail of sonic artefacts and fine timbral detail. Their reticence to supply any explicit cues works to the benefit of suspending the listener’s disbelief, reserving the right to surprise and colour the mind with reeling tapestries of phantasmic, fathomless apparitions.
‘Le Monde’ first splashes on the senses with piquant arps and bass drones coaxed into a lush lather that’s pregnant with theatric dread, threaded with alien whispers on ‘Secrets’, and spangled with spring reverb in the eerily naif creep of ‘L’humanite entiere’. Their organic, fractally shifting collage of tape loops and synths in ‘Oeufs’ feels as though we’re combed backwards below the waves on a dreamlike shoreline, where they metamorphose into discordant, howling rave hoovers and caterwaul with ‘La nouvelle fin du mode’, and the deliquescent lounge music ooze of ‘Damien Schultz’, leaving us with no firm grasp of what the hell we’ve just been listening too, but totally enthralled nonetheless.
(Boomkat)
20,00€
Out of stock
LP
OPÉRA MORT
“Film Works”
Edition of 300.
These tracks were recorded /composed between the 2nd and the 4th of April 2016 as exclusive soundtracks for ‘The Potted Psalm’ by James Broughton & Sidney Peterson and ‘Dream Work’ by Peter Tscherkassky. Both were initially broadcasted / played on the 15th of April 2016 at Night of The Experimental Film in Gent, Belgium. The Potted Work is an outtake from the same sessions. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Album design by Mathieu Serruys & Joris Verdoodt.
As part of the 2016 festival Night of the Experimental Film, French duo Opéra Mort (= Èlg + Fusiller) performed a live soundtrack for two films that centre on the paradoxical symbiosis of love and death: ‘The Potted Psalm’ by Sidney Peterson and James Broughton, and ‘Dream Work’ by Peter Tscherkassky. Both films convey love and death as both direct opposites and kindred concepts, turning to cryptic surrealism, poetic hallucinations and flickering alternations between flesh and ecstatic abstraction. Opéra Mort’s sonic accompaniment is a squirming contradiction, fraught with micro-harmonic friction and bleeps of electronic alarm. Is the soundscape melding into a solitary whole or blowing itself apart?
With ‘Film Works’, the duo have adapted their soundtrack into a standalone recorded work. Synthesisers flicker like computers trapped inside calculative loops. Flailing organs knot into tendrils of microphone feedback. Occasionally it’s possible to identify traces of body and voice within the wretched lattice – resting-state heartbeats, regulatory beeps of life support – which are only ever faintly present within Opéra Mort’s transcendent elsewhere, like echoes humming through the membrane between the corporeal world and the heights of ecstasy. Just like the films that inspired it, ‘Film Works’ enacts the strange disputation that defines the climactic extremes of human experience: to love and death, the body is both the fundamental vessel and the husk that is left behind.
These tracks were recorded /composed between the 2nd and the 4th of April 2016 as exclusive soundtracks for ‘The Potted Psalm’ by James Broughton & Sidney Peterson and ‘Dream Work’ by Peter Tscherkassky. Both were initially broadcasted / played on the 15th of April 2016 at Night of The Experimental Film in Gent, Belgium. The Potted Work is an outtake from the same sessions. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Album design by Mathieu Serruys & Joris Verdoodt.
As part of the 2016 festival Night of the Experimental Film, French duo Opéra Mort (= Èlg + Fusiller) performed a live soundtrack for two films that centre on the paradoxical symbiosis of love and death: ‘The Potted Psalm’ by Sidney Peterson and James Broughton, and ‘Dream Work’ by Peter Tscherkassky. Both films convey love and death as both direct opposites and kindred concepts, turning to cryptic surrealism, poetic hallucinations and flickering alternations between flesh and ecstatic abstraction. Opéra Mort’s sonic accompaniment is a squirming contradiction, fraught with micro-harmonic friction and bleeps of electronic alarm. Is the soundscape melding into a solitary whole or blowing itself apart?
With ‘Film Works’, the duo have adapted their soundtrack into a standalone recorded work. Synthesisers flicker like computers trapped inside calculative loops. Flailing organs knot into tendrils of microphone feedback. Occasionally it’s possible to identify traces of body and voice within the wretched lattice – resting-state heartbeats, regulatory beeps of life support – which are only ever faintly present within Opéra Mort’s transcendent elsewhere, like echoes humming through the membrane between the corporeal world and the heights of ecstasy. Just like the films that inspired it, ‘Film Works’ enacts the strange disputation that defines the climactic extremes of human experience: to love and death, the body is both the fundamental vessel and the husk that is left behind.
18,00€
In stock
LP
OPERA MORT
“Dédales”
Dédales is the second LP from Opera Mort following a debut for the inhouse label of the sadly defunct Parisian record shop Bimbo Tower. The project is an ongoing collaboration between Jo Tanz and Laurent Gerard, two figures from France’s contemporary avant garde underground; Jo with his Tanzprocesz label and Laurent with his Élg project (Élg’s ‘Mil Pluton’ album appeared on Alter in 2012). They also form two thirds of the trio Reines D’Angleterre with the legendary French artist Ghedalia Tazartés who will be returning to live performance later in 2014. The 8 tracks on Dédales were edited down from a series of improvised live takes of abstract and other-worldy electronics, shifting the Opera Mort sound into more focussed territory and creating a musical language that’s uniquely singular and a direct result of their close collaborative relationship.
18,00€