Croaking toads, bubbling cauldron, howling wolves, screeching bats, gloomy spectral voices… All these horror-movie clichés could easily have fallen out of Boris Pickett’s favourite fright flick, but Sphaèros avoids the facile parodic trap and unveils over seven tracks a much more singular universe. Possession is a sinister plunge into darkness that’s hard to resist, like the call of a seductive vampire to whom one is irresistibly attracted. If a riot of allusions surface here, those of comic books and B-movies of the ’60s, the filmography of Dario Argento and the writings of Aleister Crowley, it’s also MKB, Can, Tanger and Dashiell Edayat that the enigmatic French all-rounder (poet, sculptor, director…) invokes. There is something very sexual, tribal and bewitching here. David Sphaèros, high priest of the dark arts known for his work in Aqua Nebula Oscillator, takes the listener on a troubling journey that requires three years to conceive, where psychedelia and nightmarish krautrock are combined with black magic.
