Stagnant Waters – An Alchemical folie à trois

When French guitarist Camille Giraudeau realised that his latest metal experiments were heading in a more electronic and violent direction, evidently influenced by records from bands such as Dødheimsgard or Atomsmasher/Phantomsmasher, he decided he wouldn't pursue that path within the confines of Dreams of the Drowned, the black-metal band he was in at the time (we're talking around 2007), but that the moment had come to "grow even further". Setting out to find a drummer, he soon met Aymeric Thomas, who also played clarinet and dabbled in electronics: "Camille asked me to rehearse together, so we traded ideas for a while and the result was pretty stimulating. Then ours became a two-headed project, with lots of ideas and random intuitions merging together. When there was enough material for an album, we decided to ask Svein Egil (who already had plenty of experience behind him, most notably with Dødheimsgard and Fleurety, ed.) to join us as singer. The first time we finally met in person was after almost two years of collaborating online".

As a nom de guerre they chose Stagnant Waters, inspired by the eponymous song by Dälek: "I'm pretty obsessed with water in general", Giraudeau confesses. "Also, I was starting to experience stagnation myself, being a depressed individual tied to water, so it all made sense. 'Algae', the first track we put together, was in a way about exactly that".

Working together, the three honed a black-metal sound that is highly experimental, dissonant and, I'd say, even Dadaist. "We came to define our sound by riding chance the way Isabelle Adjani rode madness in 'Possession', the film directed by Andrzej Żuławski in 1981. But also by sanctifying whatever happens in an instant, when two or three souls or non-souls touch. Bodies of music, sick bodies enjoying each other, themselves included. An alchemical folie à trois". Those are Giraudeau's words, joined by Thomas's: "As far as I'm concerned, the only commandment of this band is the absence of boundaries. Being without rules in the creative process. While staying close to metal's various subgenres, I've never been too attached to the internal musical codes that usually define a band. Borders are made to be broken."

Having tested their abilities on the split EP "Sea Of Abandoned Polaroids", shared in 2009 with fellow countrymen Phlegma, Stagnant Waters had to wait three more years before their self-titled debut album (8 tracks; 45:43) finally saw release. That task fell to Belgian label Adversum, which presented the record as "a highly radioactive mix of scraping guitars, otherworldly electronics, Dadaist improvisation, uncompromising complexity and unnatural rhythms" — in short, a "kaleidoscopic and devastating post-black-metal chaos", the offspring of a band born "from eggs laid at the turn between the 19th and 20th century, when black metal broke free from the trap of convention to seek new forms and dimensions". Exaggeration? Not in the slightest!

Opening with their very first track ever, "Algae", which fuses feverish old-school onslaughts, numbing mechanics and interludes disorienting in their abstraction, all of it projected into a universe where stagnation is synonymous with existential anguish (“Non sentire nulla è contagioso/ L’asse del vivere in silenzio/ Sono qui, impotente/ Non c’è mai fine al nulla/ I miei dolori sono tristi cacciavite nella cassetta degli attrezzi/ Non mi adeguo mai, non mi alieno mai, non sogno mai”), Stagnant Waters' debut, though still somewhat raw, still sounds vital today, moving between assorted oddities ("Сраер цнапял пнои тат": clarinet, piano, voices, all filtered, disfigured, abnormal, true to the idea of the perfect "soundtrack to our own mummification"), hallucinatory cacophonies ("Of Salt And Water"), traces of death-metal scattered through the corridors of a castle where past and present dissolve into one another ("Castle"), free-jazz in the hands of raving lunatics ("Concrete", a track urging Europe to wake up and take the problem of nuclear waste seriously) and black-metal taught to video-game sprites ("From The Breaking Neck To Infinity"). Finally, in the ten minutes of "Axolotl", all the album's madness seems to condense, even dragging in biblical quotations and others drawn from Seneca's "Epistulae morales ad Lucilium"!

Tell me, Lucilius,

what is there to find if not the absurdity of our passions,

the vanity of our faith,

the folly of our ambitions?

When one has watched their wretched soul run aground in the infinite void of this so-called life,

what's left but the objective standpoint born of hatred and sheer absurdity?

After the debut, it would take a full twelve years to find a trace of another Stagnant Waters record! "'Rifts' took a very long time to complete, between nervous breakdowns, geographic distance, side projects and thermonuclear holocausts. But in the end we pulled through," explains Giraudeau.

"The fact that we all live in different countries definitely played a part," adds Thomas, "but I guess this long stretch of time was also needed to mature. The first sketches date back ten years, and the results are very different."

Compared to its predecessor, Rifts is a more mature and accomplished record, though still thoroughly unconventional. "It all started as a very intense, visceral creation, which then turned into more cerebral music. That's probably down to the amount of time we spent composing 'Rifts'. That's basically what changed. There was a lot of back and forth between people, ideas, arrangements and recordings, compared to the one-way ticket that was our first album."

Released in a "double" edition, "A" and "C" (the same tracks from the LP appear in alternate version on the CD), Rifts (14 tracks; 98:40) moves through a borderland where you can spot the flags of Ved Buens Ende, the Arcturus of "La masquerade infernale", Dødheimsgard, Fleurety, but also those of bands seemingly far removed from their sonic universe, such as experimental grindcore standard-bearers Discordance Axis, Blind Idiot God, Mr. Bungle, Amon Tobin, Virus (the Norwegian ones, of course), Jaga Jazzist and This Heat, all flying over the backdrop of an asylum haunted by the ghost of David Lynch, a director very dear to the band. Among their extra-musical influences, the group cites "autism, chaos, fun, sadness, shades of grey and of rainbows, cats, foxes, loneliness, brain damage, seriousness and a curious sense of humour".

Giraudeau: "The idea for the double version of the record came to us spontaneously, through the course of events. You see, after the split, instead of letting one of these versions prevail over the other, we decided to turn the whole thing into an opportunity, keeping in mind the Schrödinger's cat paradox. A truly anarchic-quantum take on musical collaboration! The result is a deeply unsettling listen, but we're very happy that people seem to be enjoying it, even though it requires stepping a little out of your comfort zone. Besides, it seems that this simultaneous release of two completely different versions of the same album within a single entity had never been done before. The idea may have originated with Fleurety's 'Department Of Apocalyptic Affairs', since the track 'Face In A Fever' appeared there in two versions."

Accompanied by a rather unsettling cover, created by Svein Egil (who "wanted to convey a sense of monstrous post-forest stalking/chase. Are you the hunter or the prey? The monster or the norm? The identity of the land, the landscaper and the wanderers"), Rifts is dominated by tracks with no real centre of gravity, proof that over the years Stagnant Waters' music has grown ever freer and more centred on improvisation, understood as the chance to "crystallize the moment, trusting in what lies hidden all around: the magic of chaos".

It opens with "Black Fields (C)", kicked off by what sounds like folk-metal from the land of ice. Either way, the band is quick to remind you that their sound is a forest of estranging symbols, really more a state of mind, as made clear by the "(A)" variant of the track, more suffocating, but also, in some ways, stupefying and galactic. In the lyrics, the echo of a world now in collapse: "⟦Q1⟧"

"Split And Spilled (C)" doesn't let up, making way for "Gonad Waltz", a headlong, disorienting assault, with sudden bursts of bizarre music-box melodies and flamethrower solos, ready to trigger ever more frantic dashes, interrupted only by unsettling post-bomb rituals for the aftermath. The "A" version of "Gonad Waltz", longer (clocking in around twelve minutes), is on the whole the more appealing of the two, thanks to a heavier use of electronics and a hellish, post-human nightmare tension. While "Crackle (C)" is oddly "clean", both in the guitar tone and in its stretched-out, reverberating atmosphere, "Crackle (A)" instead unfolds with clockwork precision, featuring free-jazz sax, coughing fits and a deranged finale. A baroque discharge of deranged digitalism forms the backbone of "Forced To Go", while "Battle Tactics Of General Nonsense (C)" alternates more relaxed moments with violent plunges into a whirlwind of dissonant violence, making room, when needed, for atmospheric comedowns where you seem to glimpse a Mamaleek poisoned and worn down by powerful radiation. In its second version, this track features acoustic inserts and a blend of cybergrind and breakcore.

The title track finally ignites with nuclear flare-ups, building a highly dramatic score, with Hatlevik's voice covering the entire sonic spectrum between an agonized whisper and a bestial scream.

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