Ravage – Ravage

Sérotine/ Mr Morezon

Restless French trio Ravage has an unusual line-up: drummer Anthony Laguerre, who also runs the Sérotine label; and two violinists, Bastien Pelenc and Mathieu Werchowski, one of whom has their instrument strung with cello strings.

With this intriguing assortment, they conjure up a momentous whirling sound that travels across borders seemingly at will, struggling up steep inhospitable inclines and streaming across open plains, as if something were in hot pursuit. But through it all they are reacting to one another’s playing in a way that showers the portentous percussion with streams of fiery frustrated strings.

The deep hypnotic drums of opener “Demon Lover” are assailed by a shrieking loop of violin, a further scree shuffling in the background. All sound levels are attacked as the violins trade chords and runs; a spindly, sickly flutter matched by a frustrated fusion effect. The drums are a battering ram, a single-minded obsessive rhythm and an extraordinary statement of intent.

The album is made up of only four tracks, but in a similar way that Godspeed You! Black Emperor manage to draw the listener into a inescapable black hole of sound, so Ravage do something similar. The classically minded opening of “Hyeronimus Dream” eventually descends into a yearning desperation that sees the violins entwined, restlessly stalking the same territory until the torrential drums arrive and throw them into tumult. The drums seem to provoke an overdriven electricity from one violin while the other stutters and shakes with frustration.

The songs are very different without drums, but nothing is ever sedate here and even on the end times despair of “Nihilist Folk”, with a repressed violin motif smeared across the top of the satisfyingly laborious drums, there is just too much angst to allow the listener to settle. The album closes with the enormous “Nex”; an hypnotic suite of torment which although quieter in parts, is still simmering, its atmospheric violins stressing points almost to breaking.

Ravage create their own soundworld that turns its back on classical and folk for the most part and beats the strings into gnarled new shapes. Momentum appears from nowhere and the soar of one violin and the panic of the other find them merging into ever-deceasing circles; a different sense of frantic that eventually explodes into fireworks, urged on by dervish cymbals.

It takes a while to simmer down but this tour de force of prodigious power is the perfect ending to an album that never lets the listener go, insisting they run until exhausted. It must be extraordinary live, but for now allow this to work its ever-insistent magic.

-Mr Olivetti-