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CD
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BORNBAD 196CD
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If Dorian Pimpernel's first album could be seen as the opening of a secret passage, this second record, Flowers Too, is something else entirely: no longer the discovery of a world, but its methodical exploration, its feverish mapping, its deepening down to the underground layers. At a time when contemporary psychedelia seems at a standstill, when ecstasy has lost its effect, when the vast territories of the imagination have been parceled out, signposted, monetized -- they keep digging. And deeper still. Esoteric pop -- the noblest, the most dangerous kind -- is no longer practiced on the surface. It has abandoned the grand avenues to retreat into hidden laboratories, mental back rooms, basements more deeply buried than those of garage, punk, or black metal. It is there that the secret society Dorian Pimpernel has been working for years, with a stubbornness that feels less like a career than a calling. Still operating on the margins of the classic "group of friends starting a band" model, they pursue their strange project: moonshine pop -- the nocturnal, lunatic, sometimes venomous reverse side of Californian sunshine pop. Except that here, the concept is no longer an aesthetic hypothesis -- it is a territory. Each song is at once fragment and totality: autonomous, yet perforated, inhabited by the vertiginous feeling that other rooms, other corridors, exist just next door. The whole forms a labyrinth whose map one may study -- or choose to get lost within. For whether one is a manic exegete or a simple nocturnal wanderer, one thing strikes first: this is pop. Grand melody. Immediate, supple, luminous -- even when it speaks from the shadows. Their influences are still present, but more deeply digested: the learned psychedelia of the '60s, the imagined bridges between Canterbury and Düsseldorf, haunted film scores, rare synthesizers and vintage guitars that populate their studio-cabinet of curiosities. Except that here, none of it is quoted anymore -- it breathes. On the surface, this music seems to come from yesterday. In depth, it is strictly contemporary: ambiguous, shimmering, unstable, vibrant. But also -- and above all -- harmonious, immediate, deliciously toxic, of an almost suspect beauty. The real surprise is that this second album already possesses the density of a mature work. In its themes -- lost illusions, roads leading nowhere, parallel worlds brushed against but never inhabited -- as in its form: no longer merely a proposition, but a fully realized manifesto.
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BORNBAD 196LP
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LP version. If Dorian Pimpernel's first album could be seen as the opening of a secret passage, this second record, Flowers Too, is something else entirely: no longer the discovery of a world, but its methodical exploration, its feverish mapping, its deepening down to the underground layers. At a time when contemporary psychedelia seems at a standstill, when ecstasy has lost its effect, when the vast territories of the imagination have been parceled out, signposted, monetized -- they keep digging. And deeper still. Esoteric pop -- the noblest, the most dangerous kind -- is no longer practiced on the surface. It has abandoned the grand avenues to retreat into hidden laboratories, mental back rooms, basements more deeply buried than those of garage, punk, or black metal. It is there that the secret society Dorian Pimpernel has been working for years, with a stubbornness that feels less like a career than a calling. Still operating on the margins of the classic "group of friends starting a band" model, they pursue their strange project: moonshine pop -- the nocturnal, lunatic, sometimes venomous reverse side of Californian sunshine pop. Except that here, the concept is no longer an aesthetic hypothesis -- it is a territory. Each song is at once fragment and totality: autonomous, yet perforated, inhabited by the vertiginous feeling that other rooms, other corridors, exist just next door. The whole forms a labyrinth whose map one may study -- or choose to get lost within. For whether one is a manic exegete or a simple nocturnal wanderer, one thing strikes first: this is pop. Grand melody. Immediate, supple, luminous -- even when it speaks from the shadows. Their influences are still present, but more deeply digested: the learned psychedelia of the '60s, the imagined bridges between Canterbury and Düsseldorf, haunted film scores, rare synthesizers and vintage guitars that populate their studio-cabinet of curiosities. Except that here, none of it is quoted anymore -- it breathes. On the surface, this music seems to come from yesterday. In depth, it is strictly contemporary: ambiguous, shimmering, unstable, vibrant. But also -- and above all -- harmonious, immediate, deliciously toxic, of an almost suspect beauty. The real surprise is that this second album already possesses the density of a mature work. In its themes -- lost illusions, roads leading nowhere, parallel worlds brushed against but never inhabited -- as in its form: no longer merely a proposition, but a fully realized manifesto.
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BORNBAD 061CD
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A secret society of diligent practitioners of the cabalistic part of pop music for an eternity, Dorian Pimpernel only seems to be working with one goal in mind: restart the Machine that once made us dream and go into ecstasy. Formed in the mid-2000s, it's a gathering of odd-balls only: one discreet drummer who claims to be "captivated by Ancient Greece"; a songwriter who's also a philosophy scholar and the author of a book on the aesthetics of the Minimalists; an actor - director - assistant-director - composer of film music; an actor-bass player and record collector who you would be advised not to try and silence once he's begun to list favorite artists; and eventually a guitar-player who played his guitar for a very long time locked up in his room "without thinking he would one day have the guts to leave." Far from the old habits of your ol' band of mates who migrate from the living-room to the practice room after a nice chat over a handful of favorite records, Dorian Pimpernel gathered around a general disinterest for sports and a strange concept of pop: "moonshine pop," i.e. the esoteric, whimsical, volatile, evil little sister of the famous "sunshine pop" of California. Founder of this aesthetic movement at a time when he was sole member of the Dorian Pimpernel Club, Johan Girard explains: "At the time, in the mid-2000s, I had this habit of listening to records of sunshine pop on repeat. And I had this idea of taking the notion backwards, attempt a sketch of its underside, but without distance, easy postmodern irony, or cheap revivalism." After a first attempt at an album for a label at the other end of the world (Hollandia, released on the Japanese label Rallye in 2006), Allombon creates an actual world for us to live in, and wishes us to sink so deep into it that only our dreams and nightmares shall be deep enough to accommodate its creatures, chants, and architectural works. Similar to the half-magic, half-literary, half-alchemical treatises, half-tomes of poetry of the Renaissance, Allombon creates a complex and coherent world. If our five freaks are practitioners of a dark secret doctrine, they are first and foremost believers of the power of the great pop melody. And if their art is esoteric in any way, it is in that of Alice in Wonderland, using gentleness and vivid colors. Inspired first and foremost by the first wave of scholar psychedelia (Sgt. Peppers, SF Sorrow, An Electric Storm by White Noise, The United States of America by The United States Of America), then by the second wave in the '70s (Kevin Ayers and Kraftwerk) as well as library and film of the golden age era (Morricone, Basil Kirchin), and by thousands of haunted instruments (rare or very rare synths, old guitars). Dorian Pimpernel have only one stated goal: give rise to tornadoes to carry us someplace else.
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BORNBAD 061LP
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