Author & Punisher keeps mutating. Tristan Shone's project, which blurs the boundaries between man and machine in a way reminiscent of Tetsuo's cyberpunk nightmares, has now definitively opened its doors to a second musician (guitarist Doug Sabolick) and opted for a unique approach on this new album. In Nocturnal Birding, more than the pistons and other mechanical contraptions created by the artist-engineer, the driving force behind each track can be found in... birdsongs. A concept that, when you consider the heaviness of Author & Punisher's industrial metal (which claimed the label “industrial doom”), promises dizzying contrasts!
"Alouette, gentille alouette"... You know the song. The melodies and rhythms are inspired by or directly adapted from birdsong, as we can hear with Meadowlark's riff. The clear singing at the beginning may come as a surprise, but the oppressive atmosphere quickly becomes overwhelming and Shone's machines launch into their usual demolition work, crushing us mercilessly. “These machines kill fascists” is inscribed on Shone's equipment in reference to Woody Guthrie, and as his country sinks into fascism, we think of the man behind the music and what may have inspired this new album. In recent years, he has been dropping water along the Mexican border with the Border Angels group: Nocturnal Birding is also dedicated to all those who, due to a cruel policy of prevention through deterrence, have lost their lives trying to cross from Mexico to the United States. This immediately gives a more spectral dimension to these birds, often symbols of the passage of the soul from our world to another...
We're used to Author & Punisher monumental blows. Nocturnal Birding, however, manages to renew the formula enough to surprise us right from Titanis. The tribal touches provided by the Indonesians of Kuntari blend with the industrial and monumental sound of Shone, tradition and modernity coming together in an impressive hybrid monster of a track that is all the more intense for lasting only three minutes. In general, the tracks on Nocturnal Birding are short, explosions whose power is as fleeting as it is massive, reminding us of the fragility of a bird's life.
By opening up his world of noise and chaos to other artists, Shone offers his listeners the constant satisfaction of rediscovering Author & Punisher's work from a new perspective. There is the contemplative interlude of Mute Swan, accompanied by the voice of Mega Oztrosits from Couch Slut, during which percussion still lurks in the background, like menacing beasts waiting to pounce on their prey. Then we are blown away by the contribution of French death/sludge/industrial band Fange on Black Storm Petrel, which sees Author & Punisher flirting with uncompromising industrial black metal, heavy and intimidating like a monolith crushing the sun.
Yet despite the rage felt in Shone's ranting, despite the harshness of the machines, a fragile melancholy gives the album its soul. It is because it often loses itself in melancholic reveries that Nocturnal Birding manages to have such an impact. It is in these moments of vulnerability that it finds its richness, like the slender melody of Titmouse, which then returns to the fray, energized and aggressive. In a Hitchcockian reversal of fortune, titmouses will eventually get their revenge!
Thanks to his artistic questioning, never before has an Author & Punisher album been so gripping and poignant from start to finish, both in its cathartic eruptions and in its variety and more introspective moments. The melody of Thrush, the twilight conclusion, will continue to haunt us as a few actual thrush songs, both ghostly and hopeful, manage to pierce through the machines. With Nocturnal Birding, Author & Punisher's fusion of the organic and the mechanical has never resonated so strongly, monumental both in its apocalyptic grandeur and in its deeply human, intimate, and sincere moments.
