Possession Subcosmique by PRÉSENCE DU FUTUR / BÊTE LUMINEUSE

After too long, the French Canadian synth-crawler Bête Lumineuse returns to Crucial Blast, following up the amazing 2014 Murmure du Charnier album on the label (now out of print). Already a huge fan of Montreal artist / graphic designer Chimere Noire's illustrative work and iconic album designs for a myriad of releases on labels like Profound Lore, his then-relatively-new solo electronic outfit Bête Lumineuse promptly bewitched me with a deeply ominous, spectral approach to dark synthesizer-based music. The sound of that album billowed through my skull with a kind of black kosmische-tinged magic, drawing a certain amount of aesthetic influence from both the more blighted edges of underground black metal and post-industrial music's most sinister, murky fringes, while creating surreal, oppressive driftscapes that often resembled the caliginous corners of 1970's-era "space music" a la Tangerine Dream's Zeit and Klaus Schulze's Cyborg. Needless to say, I immediately became obsessed with Bête Lumineuse’s sound, and every other release that the project has released has remained in steady rotation here at the C-Blast compound over the ensuing decade. Ten years later, I was immensely excited when Bête Lumineuse approached me with a new release, a split album pairing BL with fellow Quebecois artist Présence Du Futur for a perfect fusion of stygian synthesizer soundscapes and the utterly mesmerizing retro-futuristic strangeness and mystery of Présence Du Futur''s music.

In fact, this album was my introduction to Présence Du Futur, and after diving into its unique mixture of minimal electronic fog, spooky electronic collage, and fascination with UFOlogy and "High Strangeness", man, I was hooked. Named after a vintage line of science fiction books published by French publisher Denoël, this is one of several musical endeavors from the prolific entity behind the armageddon electronics of Les Hommes-Chiens, experimental black metal outfit Ossements, and the acclaimed ambient black metal / drone doom band Neige et Noirceur, and entirely and completely different from anything else he's created. Présence Du Futur opens Possession Subcosmique with three flowing tracks, nearly half an hour long, of gorgeous, lavish electronic tones and textures that melt together into epic, interstellar journeys through light and dark, haunted by the presence of non-human intelligences and exotic technologies beyond our comprehension. The music is darkly melodic, sumptuous, undeniably influenced by that classic post-krautrock "space music" field, but incorporating fields of grinding distortion, delicate mournful keyboards, vast washes of grainy haze, and an esoteric undercurrent beneath each of these long, winding departures from Terra Firma. Imagine if early Tangerine Dream had been entirely consumed with the concepts behind UFO lore, contact with otherworldly intelligences, and the question of abduction phenomena, and you'll be in the vicinity of what Présence Du Futur creates. It's immersive, often stunningly beautiful, but also deeply eerie and enigmatic how the artist crafts these electronic narratives and fields of analog ambience.

The other half of Possession Subcosmique lives up to the album title with Bête Lumineuse's "Zersetzung" trilogy, plunging from the hazy, celestial heights of the first half into the depths of the abyss. Translated to English as "disruption" or "decomposition", the term appears throughout a strange assortment of late 20th Century covert operations and descriptions of psychological warfare, adding greatly to the dense fields of foreboding that run through his side of this album. "Zersetzung" is a nightmarish wonderland of rumbling subterranean noise, layers and layers of cavernous sound and drone all tumbling over each other as each track surges forward into muffled, cloudy masses of heavy ambient sound. Waves of charred-black drift and massive crustal displacement, huge surges of low-end menace, ultra-heavy and ultra-suffocating even while lulling you into a kind of lightless trance. Doom-laden chordal changes emerge from the darkness like blasts of portentous quasi-orchestral sound. Sampled voices describing diabolic protocols and radiation exposure introduce new sonic assaults of churning, turbulent electronics. Crushing low-frequency death-drones spiral up out of the deep, followed by streams of pestilential skree and keening, tortured circuitry. Bells tolling across the Styx, finally dispersing into a mist of ancient Moog-ified melody. This is some of the absolute darkest and creepiest music I've ever heard from Bête Lumineuse; an atmosphere of unrelenting annihilation hanging over every moment. His sub-earth electronics verge on the heaviest edges of death industrial, while always maintaining that swirling, primal cloudform. Like transmissions from one of the nine circles of hell.

A perfect pairing of two of Quebec's finest purveyors of analog electronic dread. The cassette edition is issued in a limited pressing of one hundred copies, with outstanding Chimere Noire graphic design and a digital download code.

Crucial Blast is an independent underground label, online shop, and small press specializing in cutting edge, weird, and experimental heavy music and related cultural artifacts, with a particular focus on blackened avant-metal, nihilistic noise/industrial, dark ambiance, infernal psychedelia, hardcore improv/free-jazz, and experimental horror film / literature.

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