LYDIA LUNCH & PHILIPPE PETIT
Twist Of Fate
MONO035CDVD
Monotype Records 2011
08 Tracks. 47mins34secs / 06 Chapters. 43mins01secs

PHILIPPE PETIT
Philippe Petit Scores Henry: The Iron Man
AGO030
Aagoo Records 2011
03 Tracks. 40mins17secs

LYDIA LUNCH & PHILIPPE PETIT: Twist Of Fate
Amazon UK: DLD US: DLD Boomkat: CD + DVD iTunes: DLD
PHILIPPE PETIT: Philippe Petit Scores Henry: The Iron Man
Amazon UK: CD | LP | DLD US: CD | DLD iTunes: DLD

Twist Of Fate documents the creative partnership between American songstress, poet, writer and actress Lydia Lunch and French experimental sound artist and turntablist Philippe Petit across an album and a DVD. Lunch emerged in the mid-seventies as part of No Wave combo Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, which formed in New York in 1976, and has maintained the same fiercely individual and independent spirit for over thirty years. Her considerable body of work spans countless solo records, collaborations with anyone from Einstürzende Neubauten, Henry Rollins or Sonic Youth to Oxbow and Omar Rodríguez-López, as well as numerous films, books and plays.

A journalist, record label owner and musician, Philippe Petit has been a figure of the underground music scene for over twenty five years, yet his first solo release, Henry: The Iron Man, only came out in 2009. Since though, he has delivered a number of essential records on labels such as Boring Machines, Aagoo, Sub Rosa or Trace Recordings, collaborating with numerous artists and musicians often operating as Philippe Petit & Friends. He his also one of the masterminds behind Strings Of Consciousness, a loose collective counting some twenty more or less regular members.

On Twist Of Fate, the pair bring together their respective sonic universe into a bleak and disturbing soundtrack. Lunch provides abstract paranoid spoken word tales and guitar textures, which Petit wraps in dense claustrophobic soundscapes. There is a striking synergy between the two which is feeds of the mutual respect they have for each other and of the propensity they have to listen to each other and react in consequence. They occupy very defined and separate spaces here, Petit crafting sounds, Lunch dispensing stories, but they work extremely closely, never taking advantage of a situation to gain an edge over the other.

Lunch’s voice, in turn soft and intimate, harsh and distant or processed to accentuate the oppressive aspect of her stories, feels perfectly at home cast against Petit’s highly corrosive and splintered soundscapes. Collating decaying structures, fragmented sound sources and distressed layers, he continuously balances his compositions between dream and nightmare, bliss and horror, treading a fine line between very diverging moods to exacerbate the tone of these pieces.

If anything, the DVD version of Twist Of Fate, recorded live at Cabaret Aléatoire in Marseille, Petit’s home turf, in 2009, is even rawer and more disturbing. Lydia Lunch’s voice is particularly haunting, and her delivery has an urgency which doesn’t transpire quite as clearly on the record, and Petit’s soundscapes appear sharper, noisier and more angular. The mood is accentuated by the extensive use of images of people or places, often superimposed over the performers, adding to the overall feeling of paranoia filtering from the set. Songs are for the most part recognisable, but they are submitted to very different sound treatments, making this a fascinating complement of the record.

Originally published on Beta-Lactam Ring Records two years ago, Henry: The Iron Man was recently given a full vinyl release on Aagoo, which also issued Petit’s utterly excellent A Sent Of Garambrosia last year. The idea of the album came after Petit dreamt that he was working on the soundtrack of a remake of Eraserhead by Japanese film director Shinya Tsukamoto in which Henry Spencer was mutating into an iron man. Very much like on Twist Of Fate, the soundscapes Petit assembles here are bleak, visceral, textural and extremely distressed. The resulting constructions are particularly contrasted, ranging from the dense sticky matter of the twenty minute epic Salaryman’s Dream to the sparser In Tokyo Henry Spencer Is Fine, which swerves around occasional bursts of distortions, and the stern ambient plateaux of Lady In The Radiator Meets The Fetishist, which sounds like early Orb dipped in acid.

Henry proved a truly inspired debut for Philippe Petit, a piece of work which came many years into his activism, the fruit no doubt of a long gestation and a reaction to the music he had experienced as a journalist and label head. Two years on, it has lost none of its impact, and it only seems logical for a record making extensive use of turntablism to finally be issued on vinyl. Twist Of Fate on the otter hand is the meeting of two like-minded artists who share a common vision for challenging  work and a fiercely independent approach to their craft. It slots in perfectly in their respective cannon, yet it also stands slightly apart, their collaborative spirit being much more than the sum of its parts.

Twist Of Fate: 4.7/5 Philippe Petit Scores Henry: The Iron Man: 4.5/5

Lydia Lumch & Philippe Petit (MySpace) | Lydia Lunch | Philippe Petit | Monotype Records | Aagoo Records
LYDIA LUNCH & PHILIPPE PETIT: Twist Of Fate
Amazon UK: DLD US: DLD Boomkat: CD + DVD iTunes: DLD
PHILIPPE PETIT: Philippe Petit Scores Henry: The Iron Man
Amazon UK: CD | LP | DLD US: CD | DLD iTunes: DLD