Eugene S. Robinson and Philippe Petit — Last of the Dead Hot Lovers

Bombastic. Pretentious. Effective. Walking a line between avant garde sound experiment and spoken-word performance art, Last of the Dead Hot Lovers tells of the volatile relationship between a man and a woman in two acts.

The first piece (“Dinner Done”) focuses on the status of the relationship, which has been driven to a breaking point as both sides reflect upon its history, frustration at what has developed between them, and the sorrowful way their feelings have changed. It ends in murder, though it’s not entirely clear if it’s literal or figurative. The second piece (“Going. Going. Gone.”) primarily wallows in the regret and reflection that follows in the aftermath of the violence.

Starring published novelist Eugene S. Robinson, who wrote the text, and featuring Kasia Meow as his female counterpart, the project is mostly a forty minute test of one’s patience but it ultimately does exactly what it sets out to do. Like a Lynch movie, it leaves a noirish impression of emotional mood and meltdown while not exactly stating what has just occurred. The listener must gather up the elements he or she has just overheard and draw conclusions from both the lyrical and sonic clues.

In fact, despite the constant feverish psycho-jabber of the leads, the action is fundamentally told through Philippe Petit’s dense and disorienting soundtracks, kitschy constructs of musique concrète and found sound that occasionally interrupt the story but for the most part enhance it. For example, he amps up the percussive cacophony once the emotions of the performers reach a sky-high, violent pitch, yet relies on slightly cooler but never tranquil washes of droning synth and one-note strings to enhance the moments of disturbed reflection, such as in the aftermath of the killing.

Throughout the piece, Robinson’s vocals vary from gruff whispers to exaggerated bluesy bellows. His parts are primarily tone poems, with some rhythm to their delivery and the occasional rhyme. Meow mostly whines, murmurs, and purrs in the background of the noisier first half, and while she is certainly aptly named, the sleepy sex kitten persona does occasionally grate. Her role mellows dramatically for the second piece, as it appears the woman is the one who has done the killing. She repeatedly quotes Cher (“Do you believe in life after love?”), confesses her coldness (“Do you know how many times I asked him if he was alive before I decided to make sure that he was dead?”), proffers explicit violence (“I opened his veins with a knife”), and admits to the eventuality of the deed (“It was ended at the beginning, but I knew that at the start”). And yet, as she studies the dormant form of her dead lover, he begins to speak again, at one point intoning, ““We should have killed him quicker than we did... but we didn’t.”

Again, trying to discern an honest account of the events is difficult when your only witnesses are overwrought with passion and controlled by their emotional responses. And sometimes it’s hard to tell if the voices are meant to be a dialogue, or whether they’re mimicking each other. The narrative is willfully hard to follow, especially with Petit’s nonstop barrage of clatters, scratches, twangs, and thick washes of white noise dominating track one, where the motive for the murder most likely lies.

But in the end, all the ingredients work together to showcase the best facet of the recording: the brilliance of Robinson’s text. While exploring the gray area between love and hate in fascinating detail—at one point the woman can’t seem to make up her mind whether or not every minute behavior of his appalls her or turns her on—he stumbles across harsh human weakness that rings painfully true, and this message cuts through all the bombast and pretentiousness like a knife