Black Psychedelia: ‘one of these days I’m going to cut you into pieces’ and other carrion.

I have a problem w/ the term ‘psychedelia’ ; negative associations of a ‘hippie’ falseness, nevertheless my arte is, I know, deeply psychedelic in a true sense, a kind of synaesthesisia, a scrambling, an overload that seeks Samadhi in its primal gush, that will reconnect one with the all, or rather, a ‘black psychedelia’, substituting the elective current, for ‘all’…

And now, what I wish to speak of, the Voltigeurs LP, ‘Carrion’, of which we are deeply proud. We had worried about the worthiness of the material as it was all recorded in one day in the studio, then the release had been subjected to lengthy delays, mainly our fault, an abortive first mastering where overly good studio monitoring had led us to boost wrongly, (also a pharmacological state that was linked to our pleasure thirsting, and possibly not conducive to audial attentiveness) and a remastering that improved on some levels but ‘seemed’ to lose some of the best original sounds... Similarly, the artwork got lost between the original screenprinters, and had to be redone and the secondary printing option seemed to be less ideal… BUT when we received the finished article, it looks beautiful: full of nuance, the glyphs on the front are as alluring, endless and puzzling as we could have ever hoped (it is an embellished copy of a detail (a neck) from a Redon b/w reproduction in a book, of a colour work, that may have been added to by a hand unknown, suggestive of a necklace…) the photograph on the back seems even more beautifully composed and focuses through a succession of ‘framings’ the notion of mirroir as Gateway to other realms, and a smaller obsidian mirroir has become… The black egg (girl w/ serpent), microcosmic cipher of the great work, the figure more sphynxlike, and in the mirroirs depths, more phantasmal glyphs that echo the front covers ones in their tantalising suggestiveness…

And then the SOUND of the LP: magnificent and rich, stately and grand. To return to my original squirming about ‘psychedelia’ I have long had a ‘block’ about some of my favourite formative sounds, namely the beautiful cold power of the best early/mid seventies output of Pink Floyd, but lately with joy we have returned to ‘Obscured by clouds’, ‘Wish you were here’ and, most importantly, ’Meddle’, and it was with surprise and pleasure we heard the unmistakeable heritage of side two of 'Carrion' in Roger Waters’ hypnotic one note basslines and echoes of Dave Gilmours crying guitar lines in the wolfhowls of ‘Sirius’. That our bastard noise could evoke the grandeur of the stars in a similar mode to cold tropes of our ‘progressive’ heroes was an unexpected joy.

(Of course one must almost wholly disregard the opening piece, ‘morning raga’ a slightly failed chaos, though I therefore enjoy the web of meaning set up between sound and a title that in common usage might suggest a healthful positive new dawn, though again I might draw a relation with some of  Pink Floyds self consciously ‘annoying’ pieces (solo pieces on 'ummagumma' etc) that offset the self contained majesty of their most focussed black psychedelic masterpieces (‘one of these days’ and ‘echoes’)).

A strange footnote to all this is the U.S. black metal act Nachtmystium's attempt of a similar alchemy with their recent ‘Black Meddle’ dyptich, 'Assassins' and 'Addicts', a working that we greatly appreciate, though one that works on a more visceral, pop level, for us…

As to the future, our current recordings as ‘Black Sun Roof’ are our most ‘blackly psychedelic’ yet and certainly embrace the malevolent machinery of Floyds ‘Welcome to the machine’ as well as Coil's ‘Musick to play in the dark’ (and it is worth pausing to contemplate the fact that Pink Floyds masterpiece of misanthropy ‘Wish you were here’ is graced, as were all their classic period (70-75) works, by beautiful sleeve artwork created by the Hipgnosis design company, who’s ranks included Coils’ Sleazy, who took the spellbinding photographs, that make up the cold alchemy of that albums ‘four elements’ artworks.)

- Matthew Bower