Fantômas - Mr. Patton's Cine-Musical Deliriums

Having brought to a close the conflict-ridden experience of Faith No More, standard-bearers of a crossover era still waiting to be properly rediscovered and reassessed, and armed with the bizarre schooling in the John Zorn method he picked up over the course of Mr. Bungle's singular trajectory, Mike Patton chose not to settle into a comfortable career rooted in sterile, dolefully conservative singer-songwriter fare. Refusing to imitate any musical form or idiom that could be crudely replicated, he instead enriched the American independent scene with this wildly eccentric diversion, nourishing all those who found no home in the folky, introspective rock so fashionable on the indie circuits of the 2000s: Fantômas gather together the most curious ideas of an incurable shapeshifter, veering off the well-trodden paths where the tired and the obsolete are content to rest

The Fantômas adventure comes about through the alliance between Mike and Greg Werckman, founders of Ipecac Recordings, a label that declared itself independent and committed to signing only original artists who stood in opposition to everything that was working commercially in the late Nineties. It's a choice that set Ipecac apart not only from the majors pushing mainstream rock, but also from all those small indie labels that had, in truth, become utterly commonplace in the United States, by that point producing anything but fresh, underground music. From the label's very first months, it's clear this will also become the home of the new Mike Patton, sheltering and supporting his endless string of collaborations.

In truth, the ground for the Fantômas project had already been tested earlier, with Mike's two solo albums — genuine experiments aimed perhaps more at himself than at the Mr. Bungle and Faith No More audience. "Pranzo Oltranzista", in particular, was a musical rendering of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist work: something utterly original, yet completely unconnected to the term "rock".

In the spring of 1998, Patton set to work on what would become the "Diabolik Demo", music composed as an idealized depiction of the Italian comic book of the same name. Convinced of his new creature's worth, he went in search of a new band — one willing to follow him through whatever deranged flashes of inspiration lay ahead in the years to come. He first reached out to his trusty Mr. Bungle bandmate Trevor Dunn on bass, and for the drum kit, Mike considered his friend Igor Cavalera of Sepultura, whom he had guested with on the band's landmark album "Roots". In the end, however, partly for logistical reasons, the choice fell on another drummer who would go on to become the band's defining trademark: Dave Lombardo of Slayer. The demo was then passed along to another artist Patton held in deep esteem and admiration: Buzz Osborne, heart and soul of the Melvins, a band that remains essential yet too often forgotten or glossed over whenever the stories of grunge, stoner and psychedelia get told.

Diabolik, the genius of evil, gives way to Fantômas, another figure out of pulp crime fiction, but darker and more mysterious in character, and thus better suited to the atmospheres the four musicians would go on to create. Known as Amenaza Al Mundo, the first self-titled Fantômas album is also Ipecac's debut release — a label that, in its early years, would struggle mightily to survive in a music business where it certainly wasn't the likes of Dalek, Isis or Tomahawk flying off the shelves of record shops and megastores. Thanks, however, to European distribution through Southern, Ipecac manages to stay alive and, month after month, to steadily grow its following.

The first chapter of the Fantômas saga stands as arguably the group's greatest work, unveiling a style that is both new and wildly original: hardcore blasts, ambient and soft interludes, metal shards, screams and sighs all seem to conjure, in purely imaginative terms, a musical rendering of the comic's thriller atmosphere. There are no words here, only shouts and cries sketching out the thirty pages of this episode. It's a record that terrifies rock's more buttoned-up crowd: even those who had by then grown accustomed to the eclectic crossover of Faith No More, always rich in nuance and theatricality, often fail to grasp its artistic scope. Lombardo's drum rolls alone generate genuine jolts of high tension, while Patton's performance leads the rest of the troupe, within which King Buzzo's remarkably melodic guitar stands out. The record traps the listener in a roughly forty-minute nightmare: a new kind of experience built from rock's classic four-piece lineup.

Having rattled his audience with such a startling and deviant gesture, Patton pursues his cinematic dream further, adapting old horror and thriller soundtracks from early-Sixties cinema to the Fantômas style, with a few exceptions made for other, more recent masters of noir. The result is The Director's Cut, the band's second album, and perhaps their most conventionally coherent. Nino Rota, Bernard Herrmann, Angelo Badalamenti and Krzysztof Komeda are just some of the composers behind themes from films like Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby", Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" and David Lynch's "Fire Walk With Me", reworked through the Fantômas lens and claimed by Patton with a performance worthy of a Golden Globe nod. In particular, "Experiment in Terror" and "Cape Fear" also prove to be show-stopping numbers across the band's many live performances, which grow tighter and more coordinated with each passing year. On the night of the true turn of the millennium, December 31, 2000, Fantômas recorded a joint live show with the Melvins in San Francisco. Mr. Bungle took the stage first, in one of their final performances before splitting up, after which two drum kits were set up — one for Dale Crover and one for Dave Lombardo — along with two bass amps for Trevor Dunn and Kevin Rutmanis, and the rest of the gear for the remaining members of both bands, joined also by Dave Stone handling some electronic tracks. Thus began the concert of the Fantômas+Melvins Big Band, running through Buzz Osborne's band's classics like "Hooch" and "Night Goat", sung together by and with Patton, alongside the high-speed noise fragments of the first Fantômas album and the horror-movie interpretations from The Director's Cut.

Millennium Monsterwork, as the experiment is titled, stands as Ipecac's nineteenth release. The recording quality comes across dirty and raw, somewhat like Alice In Chains' electric live sets; it becomes hard to pick out the individual musicians amid this frontal assault as they all play together. For an event of this scale, a cleaner mix and better overall quality would have better served a performance of such magnitude. Still, once again, it's the sheer originality of the idea that cements this Patton project's place.

Two years later, during which Patton devotes himself to Tomahawk, Delìrium Còrdia arrives in stores — a monumental, single-track work conceived as though unfolding inside an operating room, where surgeon Patton and his assistants bring to life something both ambitious and perfectly realized. It marks yet another change of direction: a nocturnal journey that feels like being trapped inside a David Cronenberg film, where metal dissolves into ambient, trance-like atmospheres curdle into nightmare, and nightmare curdles into reality. Across 55 minutes, Mike Patton, aided by his trusted collaborators — this time acting almost as hired hands working part-shift — plunges the listener into his own private world of film noir and dark, elusive dreams. Adam Jones of Tool lends a hand too, putting his synthesizer in service of this long suite, stitching together passages that would otherwise feel disjointed. The album's artwork, which goes on to become Ipecac's best-selling release, is made up of splatter imagery designed to unsettle the eye, as if the listener were meant to be assaulted on every front and sense while engaging with this music. It is the crowning achievement of Patton's genius, one that also leads inattentive audiences to reassess the rest of his post-Faith No More output. Live shows followed too, including dates in Italy: over the years Fantômas played Turin, Bologna, Rome, Perugia, Bergamo and Ferrara, watching their audience grow with every stop.

Recorded at the same time as Delìrium Còrdia, the band's next album is essentially a return to their roots, even if the basic idea — for once, not carried out in practice — was to depict the world of Japanese cartoons in Fantômas style. To that end, the well-known Japanese artist Yoshimoto Nara was brought in to design the artwork for this new record, embellishing the work with no fewer than thirty amusing drawings, matching the number of days in April, the month of irony to which the album is ideally dedicated. Suspended Animation, this new chapter for the band, tries to retrace, with new approaches and new flourishes, the ground broken by the first album, but in doing so fails to recognize that the sheer essentiality and freshness of Amenaza Al Mundo were exactly what made that now-historic debut work so well. What's especially worrying is that, for the first time, Patton seems to be looking backwards, as if he'd run out of ideas for this project. Still, the band produces a remix of Björk's “Where Is The Line”, from the album “Medùlla“, which appears on a compilation whose proceeds go to Warchild. Terry Bozzio stands in for Dave Lombardo, busy with Slayer, on the European tour, and Mike Patton announces, alongside the release of two albums from his long-awaited new solo project Peeping Tom, that ideas are taking shape for two more Fantômas records — one featuring Terry Bozzio on drums, the other more electronic and a departure from the earlier chapters. We'll see what happens, and it's a safe bet we won't have to wait too long…

While plenty of people still mourn the breakup of Faith No More first, and then Mr. Bungle, it's equally undeniable that Mike Patton, as an artist and composer, has pushed past his own limits and expanded his range, building around himself a veritable alternative empire capable of reaching everyone who looks to rock for something beyond the mass of prefabricated music that dominates the pop landscape.

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