Following the path of Maxime Taccardi, an artist who has already explored black metal from a number of angles with the likes of K.F.R, Osculum Serpentis and Kyūketsuki, is a plunge into darkness that spares us no torture and does nothing to make the listener's life easy, pleasant or reassuring. We know that he likes dissonance, unease, dirty productions... And when he announced that he was going to mix post-punk and industrial with Contemplating the Void, his new project (yet another!), our interest was bound to be piqued, especially as he'd already teased the genre from afar with Griiim.
However, if you're familiar with the musician's work, you'll be well aware that you can't expect any respect for the genre's codes... With his eponymous debut album, Contemplating the Void offers a personal take on the aforementioned genres. It's twisted, tortuous, uncomfortable and haunted, just like the voice that seems to come to us from another reality and the funereal heaviness that imposes itself (Endless War). The coldness is there, as are the synths and the reverberating percussion that reminds of an abandoned factory. There's also the bass that introduces The Claws of Loneliness as Joy Division's putrid corpse seems to stagger through a radioactive haze.
Taccardi's music is expressionist, instinctive and visceral, sometimes noisy. He proves it once again: here, negative emotions are expressed in all their grimacing excess and underlined by effects that accentuate a heightened sense of intimacy. Black is Black: Contemplating the Void, with its muffled vocals, misshapen echoes, whispers, gurgles and the impression that every rhythm, every melody is rotting on its feet (or slowly rising from its grave) is an album that sounds like it was composed by the dead. The oppressive strings (Solace and the return of black metal borborygms in its final section) abandon us for the duration of Savior Satan, only to drop us into the abyss: this nightmarish, despairing track is a rare example of Taccardi's minimalism, which also manages to suggest a lot by doing less.
Yet, at the risk of blasphemy, it's impossible not to detect a certain desire for turbulence, an almost jubilant insolence in this album. Admittedly, it's probably one of the most haunted works by its author, approaching Kyūketsuki for the macabre scent it conveys, but we also suspect a refreshing effrontery in the artist's mania for twisting genres. Contemplating the Void is to post-punk what K.F.R is to black metal: a mutant cousin freed from ready-made recipes, an intimate reinterpretation that assumes responsibility and doesn't give a damn about respecting anything, be it preconceived moulds or us, poor listeners once again shrivelled and miserable.
Although he hides it, we nevertheless suspect Taccardi of having a certain sense of humour, as he proved with Griiim, and his cover of Goodbye Horses by singer Q Lazzarus could be further proof of this: by appropriating the song associated with the killer from The Silence of the Lambs, he mixes new wave melancholy and abysmal darkness, gloom and pop quirkiness, as when he proposes paintings hijacking Teletubbies or Peppa Pig... In the end, that's the strength of this atypical, ultra-productive artist: he's free from conventions and, by plunging us ever deeper into his own private Hell, with a sound that's ever more unhealthy and hermetic, he nevertheless manages to make us rejoice. We don't know whether this is a particularly opaque form of black humour or not, and this gothic indecision is all the more delectable for it.
