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If Communion was producer Eric C. Burton’s real introduction to the world (despite several notable EPs preceding it) then Les Fleurs Du Mal is his grand gesture – an album that cements his stature among those who’d look to move the needle forward to the point of stress. The album embraces much more than Communion‘s stark atmospheres and crumbling visions of an organism eating itself from the inside out. Here, he’s let in air and light and allows them to dance around in the carcass of the beast he’s made his home, then steadily closes out through a process of aural disintegration.

The album is on a larger scale, with sonic debris littering the gritty world he’s built. It’s an album that’s frightening at moments, with heft that can be felt ricocheting through the marrow of the listener if administered through headphones. He’s an adept builder of tone, so when he turns from the airy, sunlit alleys of his opening tracks to the bombstruck nights of “Ontological Graffiti” and “Dogsblood Redemption,” the panic that sets in is real and visceral. He continues through the album like a refugee of sound in a world devoid of hope, picking at the scattered static images of our self-crowned utopia for sustenance. The record feels like a judgement, a montage of hate and hope beamed through to an alien race that speaks only in terms of atmospheric pressure on the skull.

It’s easy to see how Burton’s star has risen (he did just get off a turn working with Björk) as he’s a master of environments and doesn’t feel tethered to the notions of an album’s flow as dictated by beats, pop aesthetics, or accessibility. He’s a producer who’s working art into electronics and vice vesa. What he’s wrought here is probably one of the best futurist visions of the last few years. It’s an album that would work as orchestral doctrine in a world that’s given up on organic instruments. It is a record built for the the scavengers of the scrap heap of our modern times. When we all reach that bleak ecological break that’s been promised, this is the soundtrack that’s going to be in the headphones of the next generation.




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