restorative recalcitrance. Its the first full-length album from the veteran French harsh noise, Industrial, & power electronics agitator Mourmask150 in eight years. This obstinate & enigmatic project has been disseminating “harsh noise medicine” since 1996, in various formations, having numerous personnel passing through the cell beyond it’s central protagonist “The Hangman”.
Despite being an avid collector of this groups work, it is still difficult to exact & decipher exactly what the operation’s credo, ideology & objectives are in entirety? with the unit wielding “confusion as a weapon” as one of it’s frequent anecdotes or public missives, they regularly effect a compulsive revelling in obscurity, distortion, opacity, chaos, & incomplete & inconclusive information, which remains an obsessive feature. This cavalier disregard for clarity & comprehensible literacy can very easily lead to the band being misunderstood or misinterpreted, seeing them clash & conflict, or intimidate & repel, all spectrums of the sphere, upsetting all ends of the polarity. On other occasions, the band is austerely explicit in its proclamations or intent.
The unstable kaleidoscope muddles extreme political content, revolutionary fervour, ferocious anti-capitalism & anti-fascism, a fixation with terrorism, anti-Westernism & anti-imperialism, sedition, dissidence, anti-colonialism, sovereignty of self, as well as themes of the more “traditional” Industrial noise territory.
Naturally, a plethora of radical French political philosophy is a cornerstone & mainstay.
Prominent also was the – then unusual & highly rare – unexplained Russian preoccupation.
Beyond the band’s name, & the record label – Novaya Zemlya Productions – (administered by Hangman from 1997-2007), Russia, Chechnya & the USSR have been recurrent content, way before the current presence & awareness was established as it is today.
In one sense, Mourmask150’s ultra-hybridised “chaos” formula is almost like an “active measures” installation .. a bewildering & dangerous current of confusion & chaos …. or a free thinking & enraged confrontational dissident independent fuming into the loudspeaker.
Well kids, the band needs an essay in itself, but I am here to deliver a review of the new album on limited time & resources, so on we go then.
Vous Nous Verrez … Julien D, the enforcer that became a regular member in M150 during the later 00s episodes (& who was even the sole torch-bearer for the group on 2019’s More Goy Girls For Ghislaine compilation wit the “Act X” material), is not present on this recording.
The “two operational units” are Sentinelle and Veilleur, which consists of Hangman & a female recruit that I think I recognise as the sporadic protagonist from some earlier Mourmansk150 recordings.
This is a versatile album, deploying both passive & aggressive mediums of “avant-bête-noire lo-fi dread and digital entropy”.
The classic rapid French, often thoroughly traduced by lathered distortions, intercut or macerated with French discordance-crippled radio & news samples conjure a strong insecurity. Leering synth & slow-crackling undertow collide with harsh & fractious fallout, & piercing & caustic feedback twisting. Industrial murk, abrasive static, intermittent pounding percussion (programmed), & all manner of uncomfortable asymmetric disorientation.
The discourse is French as fuck, & will be completely unsparing to those who don’t understand the language, but the messy & venomous fast-flowing heckling & diatribes posses their own phonetic grace. Weird synthetic accordion even appears briefly on two sections, although I cannot determine the context. It could be convincingly argued that there is not a better candidate to reflect the unprecedented turbulence & mauling confusion of our days from a quietly legendary project that was conceptually always ahead of it’s days. Vous Nous Verrez is a hotbed of inhospitable volatility ….. it’s great to have them back.
2025, self released