][|][ – [_I_] (Steelkraft Manufactory)

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With an ineffable artist name and album title, you better have something big to say. And [_I_] opens with bombast, super tidal wave crashes on the jagged rocks, wind whipping a dark cloak of melody and, from on high, the peal of thousand-archangel horns.

][|][ is a side project of French industrial gloomist L´Idiot du Village. Church organs and harmoniums, muscular things, recorded live on site between 2005 and 2011, have been mixed and “denatured”, in commemoration of the many sailors lost in the Iroise Sea off the Breton coast, in ten shipwrecks stretching from 1512 to the early sixties. Framed as such, what might be heard as a Phibsean matinee horror show is transformed into something historical, monumental. Although an admirable, powerful coherent whole, the variation in each maritime tale is impressive, and just as tragic, as the last thing the men feel, battered and overwhelmed, over and over, is the sea and death becoming one.

Stephen Fruitman

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About Author

Born and raised in Toronto, Stephen Fruitman has been living in northern Sweden lo these past thirty years. Writing and lecturing about art and culture as an historian of ideas since the early nineties, his articles have appeared in an number of international publications. He is also a contributing editor at Igloo Magazine.

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