And here’s another one that’s a new discovery for me and therefore the writing that follows in this entry is mainly first impressions, which as I’ve said before is one of the main reasons for writing here — to just post random things that have passed through my ears on any given day. For many years now — since 2007 apparently — there has been a music blog called Systems Of Romance which has been a treasure trove of rare and obscure releases by artists in what might be called the post-punk and underground synth sphere — mostly releases from the 1980s. It was one of a few blogs that started around that time that started to uncover a lot of lost gems by artists that put out a handful of releases in the underground at the time and then were sort of forgotten about in the mists of time so to speak.
I was aware of Systems Of Romance in the early 2010s and like many others had discovered a lot of music I hadn’t been aware of before, and then as time progressed I found music through other avenues. However recently, with coming across a social media profile for Systems Of Romance, I visited the website again after a good number of years and came across a few recent entires on that site that piqued my interest, including the offering of a number recently posted artists I wasn’t aware of including Réseau D’Ombres, a French “coldwave” group based out of Laval active in the mid to late 1980s.
The main track featured here is called “Mirrors” for which they did a video for at the time — a simple but effective black and white TV studio affair of the band playing, making effective use of lighting to highlight the drama of the live performance. Offhand one might notice similarities to the popular UK post-punk group Killing Joke in terms of energy, presentation, style and instrumentation but overall that is a loose (and lazy) comparison. It’s likely Réseau D’Ombres were aware of Killing Joke, and perhaps took influence from them but did their own thing. If anything there might be similarities to another French post-punk/coldwave group, Complot Brunswick (see track below), who originated out of Vannes and then relocated to Rennes at some point. With both of these French groups, there’s a primal energy and notable dischord in their sound that a number of French bands — unknown to a lot of anglophiles — where doing at the time.
If we focus on the featured track here, “Mirrors”, there’s some interesting vocalisations that mimic the synthesizer work at the beginning of the song before the drums come pounding in. Pierre-Yves Hamard’s drumming on this track — and many other tracks by the band — is fierce with a lot of tribal polyrhythms through the toms and tight, short sustained cymbal accents through out. Overall the body and drive of the band’s music is in good hands with a great rhythm section, with some really muscular bass guitar work by Jean-Marc Hamard, who although plays a more straight-ahead eighth note pattern on this particular track, can get quite a bit more exploratory on the fretboard throughout the band’s release catalogue.
And then there’s the frontman and synthesizer player Ernst Lamballais. Yes, there’s similarities to the intensity and vocal delivery of Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke, but where Coleman tends to add in little synth flourishes here and there over Geordie Walker’s lush and layered guitar work, Lamballais has a far more full-on approach to his synth finger work. Often, throughout the catalogue of work by Réseau D’Ombres the synths are dense and like he’s fighting with robotic, aggressive synth patches which are often dense and full of manic dischord and micropolyphony, making for a very tense and paranoid sound. As the band lacks the traditional guitar player associated with rock music and indeed post-punk in general, Lamballais manages to fill those boots quite well with the sounds he wrangles out of his synth. It’s a bit tricky to tell what he’s actually using, but I can only assume it’s a synth from the mid-1980s that might have digital features on it as overall the sound has a quality that’s general associated with FM synthesis or phase distortion, the latter being the synth groundwork for the Casio CZ series of synths. Some further tracks by the band are included below.
To tie all the parts together, what we have here is a great, pummeling, lost synth punk anthem. A nice find for a random weekday and overall their catalogue has been getting some plays around here recently!