Many musical extremists add new layers of brick and mortar to old walls surrounding well-established genre structures, and some of them are such good crafts-people that they still deserve applause for their renewal of the fortifications. On the other hand, the anonymous Parisian collective Non Serviam take a wrecking ball to genre walls.
No doubt, what they do with their noise scandalizes some listeners, but as their name suggests, they’re dedicated to being confrontational — conventions be damned — and their confrontational nature extends to the anarchist and antifascist convictions that inspire their music. We have a prime example of all this in the video we’re presenting today for the furious Non Serviam tirade called “Apocalyptic Lust”.
This track is one of eight that will appear on Non Serviam‘s new mini-album Death Ataraxia, which releases on June 2nd via Trepanation Recordings. We’ve already spilled some words here about “Prends Moi Dans Tes Bras“, another track from the record that was released with its own freaked-out video earlier this month. And before that, the band released another single named “Mortrien“. We’ll share those two again below, but now we should focus on “Apocalyptic Lust“.
The lyrics of the song, which express a revolutionary longing for apocalypse, are brief, and we’ll include them just after the video. But we also induced Non Serviam to provide a statement about the track:
“This song was written so that a cathartic apocalypse could be born out of the refusal to leave it at that. Its slowness expresses how much we crawl in the sterile existence to which the state and capitalism impose us.”
The video, directed and edited by Non Serviam and including camera work by Lila Minni, is a kaleidoscopic mind-bender, but so is the music. It moves from dreamlike exotic melody and vivid clacking beats into a miasma of searing and moaning tonalities and wild howls. That phase of the music is disturbing and distraught. Deranged flickering sounds and gloomy, wailing vocals deepen the mood of things falling apart.
The atmosphere of mental and emotional fracturing never really vanishes, but it’s also generated through bursts of maniacal percussion, grim slashing chords, and even more shrill and superheated convulsions of sound. The vocals convulse in savagery as well, but joined by strident singing that soars — in longing. The guitar also viciously gouges with corroded and corrosive claws above frantic double-kick bursts.
Due in part to the voices, which are both wraith-like and bestial, the experience becomes nightmarishly hallucinatory, distressing and afflicted, seemingly devoid of hope but with full reservoirs of rage. There are brief ebbs, but the music builds toward catastrophe.
And here are the lyrics:
With those shackles on my feet
I don’t wanna be here
I feel the shackles on my feet
Oh Satan, give us some fucking ruins
(Here below
Apocalypse is a crystallized longing
A revolutionary desire)
Freedom for all,
Not after but before the end of all
As promised, we’ve included streams of two other tracks from Death Ataraxia below, and of course links that will allow you to pre-order the record and to stay abreast of what else Non Serviam will serve up between now and its release.
PRE-ORDER:
https://non-serviam.bandcamp.com/album/death-ataraxia-mini-album
FOLLOW NON SERVIAM:
https://non-serviam.bandcamp.com/?external_follow=1
https://nonserviamband.noblogs.org/
https://www.facebook.com/NonServiamCircle
https://www.instagram.com/nonserviamcircle/
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