Maginot — No Hope
No Hope is album number two from Maginot- a project that brings together Frenchman Romain Perrot (Vomir, Trou Aux Rats, Free As Dead, Roro Perrot), and Brit Paul Hegarty (Safe, author of Noise/Music: A History). I must say it’s a difficult album to put under one genre, as the three-track album blends da-da doom/ avant jazz, sluggish/ spastic noise rock with mumbled vocals, and found sound/loose jamming.
The CD album appears on Perrot’s Decimation Sociale label. It’s presented in a monochrome gatefold, which features on its outside blurred/over-exposed imagery. And inside minimal texts, and a blurry/inverted picture of the pair.
The pair are jointly listed as playing/ performing- voice, tapes, electronics, and power acoustic. The whole thing was recorded live in a studio, before being mixed by Hegarty. I have only very vague memories of the project's first 2019 self- titled, so I went into this largely blind.
We open with just over ten and a half minutes of “Hope, Dismal Hope” Here, we find a blend of very blunt horn piping/ billowing voice tone, gruff old man mumbling, tape hiss, doomy mouth blowing’s, and feedback forks. Later on, we get a few brief moments of coughing, which nicely adds to the whole shambling, damaged, and doomed atmosphere of the track.
Next is “Bouche Dorée”, a just under five-minute track that mixes fed through a motorbike engine guitar tone purr, wonky jangling keyboard tones, and threatening/ sweary vocals, which have a slight PE vibe- though you can barely hear them.
Finally, we have the wonderfully entitled “The Rapture Of Rotting Leather”. This takes up the lion's share of the release with its just under twenty-one and a half minutes runtime. This, I guess, is a puzzling, at times uneasy, at other times frustrating/ trying mix of sampled choral vocals, Saab warranty recordings, sourly swinging pitch drone, lo-fi noise hiss, mumbled singing, chugging industrial flow, barely heard keyboard jiving, knocks ‘n’ saws, children's Christian singing, awkward out of tune guitar picks, nursery rhyme piping, and barely heard/ out of tune sing-song vocals.
No Hope is wholly an awkward, ugly, and unwell trip of a record. If you enjoyed anti-music, gloomy da-da, or clumsy/crude soundscaping- apply within