The third and final part in the Black Devil Cosmic trilogy is with us at last.
30 years, 3 albums, the first in 1978, the second 28 years later and the third in 2008 - Eight Oh Eight.
The exact signifcance of the number eight is yet to be revealed but perhaps we should ask the Chinese - ‘In Chengdu, China the telephone number 8888-8888 was sold for USD $270,723 and next year’s Beijing Olympics will open on 08/08/08 at 08:08:08p.m.’
In the Jewish Cabbala, Eight is the number representing: abundance, authority, leadership, cosmic awareness, prosperity, and infnity.
“Seven is heaven, Eight is a gate.”
Like it’s predecessors ‘Eight Oh Eight’ features 6 tracks all with the trademark Black Devil sound but now even more haunting and bizarre. If the last album was like ‘Giorgio Moroder meets Joy Division’ then this one is like ‘Salvador Dali meets Cerrone’, surrealistic disco for space cadets. Totally unique, yet disturbingly familiar and all with that ‘sinister, psychedelic, analogue throb’ that moves you like no other.
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THE ENIGMA OF THE BLACK DEVIL DISCO CLUB
Nearly 30 years after the first album this ‘extremely rare disco masterpiece’, gets a follow up, an epic journey into the deepest electronic disco, full of haunting vocals, warped lyrics, twisted yet
melodic electronics and crisp disco beats.
In 2004 Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label released an album by Black Devil called Disco Club, a re-issue of a long lost supposedly ‘italo disco’ classic from 1978. Given it’s absurdly ‘modern’ sound many doubted it’s authenticity, some even suggesting that it was a collaboration between Richard James and Luke Vibert.
The real story is stranger still. Although credited to Joachim Sherylee and Junior Claristidge with executive production by Jacky Giordano, the album is actually the work of obscure French producer Bernard Fevre known only for his incredibly rare electronic masterpiece ‘The Strange World of Bernard Fevre’ and the even rarer ‘Earthmessage ‘ as sampled by the Chemical Brothers on ‘Got Glint?’ from their ‘Surrender’ album.
In person Monsieur Fevre does little to dispel the mystery surrounding the album. He gives his date of birth only as ‘sometime after the 2nd World War’ and despite the appearance of being in his late forties – he puts his absurdly youthful appearance down to his first wife’s obsession with ‘alternative treatments’ – claims to have been making music since the ‘60’s under a variety of pseudonyms, none of which he cares to reveal.
Then came a ‘new album’ (28 After), so similar in sound and structure to the original album that it’s impossible to know if it was created near the time of its predecessor or in the last few years and no Mr Fevre won’t say when and where it was recorded...
He claims to speak no English and yet writes and sings in it fluently, he also claims to be completely unaware of the recent Disco revival as performed by artists such as Morgan Geist of Metro Area (a long time Black Devil fan), Lindstrom, Chicken Lips, Emperor Machine and Padded Cell and yet the Black Devil’s return seems too perfectly timed to be coincidental....is there something he’s not telling us?
2008: The third and final part in the Black Devil Cosmic trilogy is with us at last. Like it’s predecessors ‘Eight Oh Eight’ features 6 tracks all with the trademark Black Devil sound but now even more haunting and bizarre. If the last album was like ‘Giorgio Moroder meets Joy Division’ then this one is like ‘Salvador Dali meets Cerrone’, surrealistic disco for space cadets. Totally unique, yet disturbingly familiar and all with that ‘sinister, psychedelic, analogue throb’ that moves you like no other.
BLACK DEVIL DISCO CLUB DISCOGRAPHY
As BLACK DEVIL: DISCO CLUB [RCA] 1978 re-released by REPHLEX 2004
BLACK DEVIL DISCO CLUB: 28 AFTER [LO RECORDINGS] 2006
BLACK DEVIL DISCO CLUB: BLACK DEVIL IN DUB [LO RECORDINGS] 2007
BERNARD FEVRE SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
BERNARD FEVRE: THE STRANGE WORLD OF BERNARD FEVRE [L'ILLUSTRATION MUSICALE] 1975
BERNARD FEVRE: COSMOS 2043 [MUSAX]
BERNARD FEVRE: SUSPENSE [MUSAX]
What people said about ’28 After’
‘phenomenal like Cerrone remixed by Martin Hannett’ Other Music
‘full-on Euro-disco...genius...irresistible’. - Pitchfork
‘italo house archivists will chew their faces off for a copy of this astounding record’ Dazed & Confused
‘truly strange disco magic’ Uncut
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The Mystery of Black Devil by Philip Sherburne
from E Music March 2007
While the profile of classic American disco is rising — both for avant-garde darlings like Arthur Russell and more mainstream (but no less genius) musicians like Patrick Adams and Larry Levan, whose solid gold productions throw off weird, mottled reflections that seem to grow stranger the more they age — European disco traditions offer a fascinating, parallel history that's less understood. As it happens, one of the movement's more obscure figures has recently surfaced with a new album — his first in 28 years.
A few years ago, the Rephlex label released a record called Disco Club that had black-crack collectors all atwitter over its white-hot machine drumming, chunky percussion loops and garbled synthesizers, sounding like an impish (and possibly evil) cousin to Giorgio Moroder. The artist, one Black Devil, was so little known that many listeners assumed it must be the work of one of Rephlex's own stable — possibly Luke Vibert, who had just recorded his own retro-sounding tribute to Italo disco under a new pseudonym, Kerrier District. But Disco Club was soon deemed exactly what it seemed to be: a lost classic from 1978, pieced together from tape loops, rickety gear and session drumming. The only real surprise was that Black Devil wasn't Italian — like most of their robo-disco peers of the era — but French, a partnership between the unlikely sounding Joachim Sherylee and Junior Claristidge, who were rumored to be false identities of Parisian library musicians Bernard Fevre and Jacky Giordano.
Late in 2006, Black Devil returned with a new recording, 28 After, for Lo Recordings. The title is an unmistakable reference to the span of years between Black Devil recordings, but it's unclear from the music itself whether these are new or old tracks. "The Devil in Us," the album's opening cut, certainly sounds like a period piece. Synthesizers pool in iridescent puddles; the Moroder-like bass arpeggio throbs mechanically, running so hot that it's not hard to believe that the song is kicking off somewhere around its 441 millionth measure. (Figure 120 beats per minute, times 28 years, and the math checks out.) The singing in the verse, an eerie echo of Ian Curtis' downcast tenor, sounds like it comes off a spool of tape that's corroded to a motley, magnetic calico texture; the Indian-whoop chorus is pure '70s disco camp, with a bit of spaghetti Western thrown in.
Are these songs — in an uncanny echo of the film 28 Days Later — sonic zombies, walking scraps of the analog undead? Are they more like Frankenstein's monsters, pieced together from bits of 1978 tape and bytes of 2006 technology? Or could they be shapeshifting cyborgs, using today's studio magic to take on a yesteryear form?
I got in touch with Fevre by e-mail to try to set the record straight about Black Devil's history and resurgence.
"We were in our own world," writes Fevre of Black Devil's original incarnation. "There was no electronic disco scene in Paris at that time and strangely we somehow invented the Italo sound." Giorgio Moroder might take issue with that, but Black Devil's isolation certainly could account not only for the uniqueness of their sound, but also the way they vanished from history for so long.
Joachim Cherylee and Junior Claristidge, confirms Fevre, were "just names we made up; we thought they sounded a little more disco." Fevre and Giordano were the only members the group — though Fevre adds, "There was a drummer whose name I've forgotten," recalling only that "it was not Cozy Powell," the British session drummer who was once considered as a replacement for Led Zeppelin's John Bonham. (Why he provides this non sequitur of a clarification, I have no idea, but it somehow seems in keeping with Fevre's one-step-forward, two-steps-back mode of disambiguation.) Fevre claims responsibility for the music, saying that Giordano only wrote the words.
Fevre claims not to have made any money on the record; distraught and broke, he says, he went "deep underground — although I did release The Strange World of Bernard Fevre on Illustration Musicale, Eddie Warner's music library label, in the early '80s. It took a long time to regain my powers."
Salvation came in the form of an unlikely convergence: a small square of paper, Aphex Twin's tongue and a DJ's immaculate timing. "Richard James was tripping on acid when he heard the original album in a club and decided it was the best music he had ever heard," says Fevre. "Rephlex managed to get the rights to re-release the album but I have still never spoken to him."
"I wish him well," he continues. "He is a very talented man and I like his beard."
His beard? OK, yeah, sure. But what about the new material? Fevre says he hooked up with Jon Tye's Lo Recordings through a mutual friend, but when it comes to the details of recording 28 After, he gets cagey, saying only that the music is his alone; he won't say whether the recordings are new, old or in-between, nor whether or to what degree 21st-century technology may have been involved. "Parts of the melodies have been with me for years," he writes, from which we can infer that these aren't purely vintage recordings. But no further details are forthcoming. "Sorry I cannot be more specific," concludes Fevre. "For me it would be like describing how I make love to a woman — some things must remain private."
Never having laid eyes on an original copy of Disco Club, or met anyone who owns one, a part of me wonders if the whole thing isn't an elaborate hoax. Is Fevre's broken-English e-mail really just another of Richard D. James' pranks? Surely it wouldn't be that hard to concoct such a ruse: seed Discogs.com with a false entry, write a believably detailed article for Wikipedia, and plant a fake sale or two of the lost "original" on eBay, and you'd create a plausible online trail of "evidence." In the end, it hardly matters; old or new, Black Devil's retro Italo offers a productive alternative to the well-oiled and aerated electronica of the current moment. It's ramshackle and agreeably slapdash. Almost literally — the keyboards sound painted with a matted, gloopy brush; the timing is inexact, hanging together as if with bits of double-sided tape and stale chewing gum. 28 After's euphoria sounds genuine, and genuinely demented — a thrilling example of disco's Dionysian urge, and yet another compelling counterargument to those who say that electronic music can't be expressive.
For evidence of retro Italo's contemporary potential, check some present-day artists working in the same vein. The Rong Music label does a great job of fusing dubby tribal house, dizzy with bongos and delay, with the cymbal-splashed, synth-rich palette of Italo disco; I'd particularly recommend Deep Fuzz's roiled grooves, Stranger and Capt. Delicious' minimalist funk and Barfly's uptempo, Latin-tinged loops.
Metro Area is the best-known act working in post-disco; their self-titled debut is a must-hear, drawing connections between Italo's chug and the more down 'n' dirty funk of American producers like Patrick Adams. (Metro Area's "Strut" is almost certainly titled in homage to Adams' "Atmosphere Strut.")
As for Fevre, he's working on a live act alongside Gwen Jamois, the friend who introduced him to Jon Tye, and back in the studio completing the third part of his "cosmic trilogy." There's even the possibility of collaborations with the new generation of disco infiltrators, he suggests. "Many musicians have been in touch with me, including [Metro Area's] Morgan Geist, who said he is a big ventilator!"
As a frequent user of Babelfish and Google's automatic translator, I think he's trying to say that Geist is a fan. Or maybe, Wikipedia be damned, he's just stirring up mythical dust devils.
