Borja Flames – ‘Rojo Vivo’
(Les Disques du Festival Permanent / Le Saule)
New album release on October 19th 2018.

We’re still reeling from Borja Flames’s previous release Nacer Blanco and the unbridled quartet tour that followed, yet the artist has already conjured up a new monster for us and is emerging from his strange studio with it, arms outstretched and as unshaven as ever.

‘Rojo Vivo’ is a record made by a heretical fan who diligently applies the lesson learnt from his masters: the only way forward is to betray your masters. And this he does, with a one-finger salute to all his elders, brothers and cousins (Arthur Russell, Robert Ashley, Robert Wyatt and all the bootleg expert members of the Le Saule family) as they roast on a pyre of shattered influences. With equal doses of autism and melomania, this new release leaves the simple, clapped out mechanics and idiot savant choruses of Nacer Blanco at the wayside. The compositions unfold as a minor opera with their deliciously intentional repetitions and abrupt digressions, which seem to hypnotise like a maze of escalators that take you up, up, up and suddenly propel you into nothingness when you least expect it.

This is an authentically bonkers album on two levels. It vehemently advocates for extreme meticulousness with its rhythmic discipline, concentrated melodies and architectural hyper-precision, all the while extolling a most impetuous sense of letting go: untimely thrusts into the unknown, harmonic untuning, and chromatic outbreaks of violence as if thick fauvist paint were suddenly splashed across the roadmap.

Using his characteristically smooth voice, Borja chants in Spanish amongst a frenzy of aberrant percussion and synthesized ejaculations, traversed by diagonal guitar lines reminiscent of dreamy mood swings  – this is strangeness personified. Opposing her partner’s somewhat epileptic ardour, Marion Cousin offers a more saturnine take: lethargic yet startling vocal riffs seem to be embodied by a falsely neutral haunted talking clock while her welcome replies to Borja’s unquestioning monologues trouble the waters for our pleasure.

Indeed, ‘Rojo Vivo’ is a work of both pleasure and turmoil: a digital spellbook that one must flip through backwards to reveal unlikely songs from the future that seem to have been woven together by a technoid Moondog. It begs us to learn arcane dances while discovering new truths about flying saucers; to inebriate ourselves with monotonous chants stolen from some dark continent of science-fiction and finally, to fabricate our own fantasies in computer folklore.

‘Rojo Vivo’ was released on Gaspar Claus’s label Les Disques du Festival Permanent, not only the perfect home for mavericks such as Marc Melià, Sourdure or Borja Flames but also a place for them to fight in the name of “living” music rather than continuing the threadbare Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.