Bela - Reverend Charles Dodgson 1 & 2
Fluffy
« Alice is a wolf, and a wolf remains a wolf ». This song turns and plays in your head like an obsession you finally dive into: appealing, fascinating, it exerts an irresistible power of seduction. Bela takes us in THE true travel through Wonderland thanks to the two EPs Reverend Charles Dodgson 1 & 2. Through the reference to Lewis Carroll’s father, Bela’s inspiration does not merely look for blessing words from Lewis Carroll and opportunity to feed on his literary universe. The idea is to create music out of which could also spring the tense dream, the thoughts questioning the meaning of life, the relevant scrutiny of social relationships, hidden behind the simple fairytale for children written by the author of Alice’s adventures. Sorrow is the back side of joy, evil is the opposite of good, frivolous spirits confront thorough minds… Everything is said, through the empire compared to a house of cards, in Whatever I can: « You call it a life of born frustration, of wasted ambition, for ambition you had, I promise, I promise I’ll do whatever I can to forget your name ». How to express with music this imaginative way, so peculiar, to tell the real world? This is a big challenge that Bela’s electro-pop successfully takes up, in a very talented way… Thanks to a noteworthy play with various instruments, it puts the sensory perception of the reality around us under the control of mind. With the first lyrics and chords of Wolves, wolves, wolves, we experience the stream of consciousness Virginia Woolf or Somerset Maugham were so fond of. We hear a Lou Reed-like voice singing an uninterrupted speech punctuated by drum beats and sharp musical curves. And suddenly, in the same way we understand Post-Victorian England through Clarissa Dalloway’s thoughts or Flush the dog’s comments, we are able to see a flow of pictures and personal thoughts directly pouring out of the human brain. We feel the pulse, the heartbeat of the world in the drums of Comes night time and at the same time, we also see the darkness of night stretching out around us, swallowing everything, filling the cracks and chinks. The fancy is here, in a perception of life shaped by our mind: frustrations of past experience in A waltz ring through cello strings and bluesy rhythm. With Focus on the target, a faraway guitar writes in our head the drama tension induced by the scheduled death: « stronger than these blue pills in your hand, it’s more than a pastime, you race with the devil, you won’t reach the final ». The twinge of sorrow due to the break-up between two people is sweating from the shalalalas on Back on the shelf, wrapped up in the guitar chords and the jazzy drums. The sweet and slow routine, peaceful daily course of life is drawn by the violin play, stretching endlessly within Carry me home. Above all, the stress expressed by beaten piano keys in I’m just kidding, Brutus shows the hollowness of all the things we run after: « What’s remain of all these things? » hummed with a feverish tone, slightly strained reminding of David Bowie. The experience is also an experiment, as intellectual as it is sensory. That’s why it sounds so great. The permanent gap between the two levels, senses and soul, helps to create a supernatural universe so attractive, so moving. The discrepancy grows even bigger, the fancy becomes real fantasy, like William Burrough’s hallucinations, in The i in lie: the first notes sounding Asiatic style, almost zen, are the whistle of the locomotive flying in the night taking on board cello and sax. The same sax rocks the soft and tired lament of Heard the PLO: « take them by surprise » to show the life we have had could have been different, that’s what we wanted, but never managed to get. We could almost hear it in the background of Peter Weller’s rambling experience in the excellent movie Naked Lunch. Indeed, the weird strangeness, the essence of fantasy radiating from Bela’s music suits perfectly some features of David Cronenberg’s hallucinated and hallucinating universe. « Alice is a wolf »… The wandering and erring ways of mind staged and praised Bela are fascinating. The alchemy outstandingly works: we are just watching the world through the looking-glass.
Fluffy