Vox Populi!

Platform 23 Records’ meandering, and sporadic journey continues, digging up archival treasures of known and unknown music sonics. The label’s close association with Paris’ based ‘ethno-industrialists’ Vox Populi! continues, here returning to their most heralded and possibly cohesive album, in Half Dead Ganga Music.  

The beautifully apt title precedes their most intense trip, pushing the boundaries away from the percussive psychedelic of albums ‘Mystcitismes’ (1985) and Aither’ (1989) to create a dark ambient masterpiece that flows as one.  The musique concrete background of founder, Axel Kyrou is most apparent here, partner Mythra’s vocals adding a voodoo ritualism and creativity, together physical and mystical extolling a parallel realm. Occult music of no pretense, mellow-drone aromas, dark ambience, obscure bass mumbles, as layer-upon-layer of tape processing and hazy vocal glossolias are oddly uplifting, a beauty distilled.  

The trip transports, via twelve succinct pieces across a ‘Studio Side’ and ‘Live Side’ each, drone and sparse drum machine pulses, vortices, and swirl, but never settling, instead segueing to further hallucinations.  The groups mercurial, spiritual, surrealism, sets them apart for the inclusion of folk instrumentation embedded in the industrial heart, the sprawling 3-piece live finale mix bubbling electronics of partially formed art song crescendo drenched improvisation that makes them so special