Album Details

• Artist: Eugene S. Robinson/phillipe Petit
• Album: The Crying Of Lot 69
• Label: Monotype
• Year of Release: 2011
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2011-09-21

This is an odd but inspired collaboration. Electro-acoustic sound artist Philippe Petit joins forces with experimental punk novelist Eugene S. Robinson (Oxbow) and reinterpret a Thomas Pynchon classic.  "The Crying of Lot 69" is thus a nightmarish, noir-ish ambient, spoken word  nightmare that drips with appetite and slowly unleashed violence and sexual dominance. Legends like Rhys Chatham and Herve Vincenti provide instrumental aiding and abetting.

"You can trust me," Robinson intones in "The Table, The Stone," as dangerous and seductive a lure for predator to prey. As if to at least pay lip service to conscience, there is also the line "there are things you will only do once/then there are things you won't stop doing," but bad things bode. With "Modern Trends In Modernity," the soundscape becomes a bit more abrasive, and Robinson's tone  more dramatic, like a Hammer Films horror soliloquy, but (mostly) without the campy overtones.

It is clear that we are witnessing some evil plans turning into action; "In My Curiosity" features   louder, grainier industrial pulse , the words more perverse amoral, a serial killer's reminiscence. All is explicit in "Change In Total" and the truly malevolent "What Eros Is."   The madness and loud tones increase here, with no comforting resolution, just an animal-like satisfying of urges. Finally, in "The Right Eye Cast" a prominent guitar, a tentative rhythm, distortion becoming  a second voice; the record ends with its creeping power about to continue off-stage, and indefinitely.

Robinson has always refused to compromise on even his less defendable positions, and he is the perfect voice for this dark tale. "The Crying of Lot 69" could be a section of a David Lynch soundtrack, or Can backing a bathtub-lounging Jim Morrison. Stylish and cruel, this is music that looks dark impulses head on, and embraces them as a part of the human experience most choose to let lay dormant.

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