Good Luck In Death - They Promised Us a Bright Future, We Were Content with an Obscure Past (2018)

GOOD LUCK IN DEATH
[Mondkopf & Charbel Haber]

THEY PROMISED US A BRIGHT FUTURE, WE WERE CONTENT WITH AN OBSCURE PAST
NAHAL002

Behind the ironic-prophetic moniker of Good Luck In Death are the duo of Parisian electronic producer Paul Régimbeau (Mondkopf, Extreme Precautions, Autrenoir, FOUDRE!) and Lebanese artist and performer Charbel Haber (The Bunny Tylers, improviser in the Johnny Kafta's Anti-Vegetarian Orchestra, Scrambled Eggs' guitarist and singer, and all 'round explorer of a new pan-Arab psychedelia with the ensembles Malayeen and Orchestra Omar).

The duo met in Spring 2017 when they were invited to join the free rock collective Oiseaux-Tempête for their AL-'AN! tour and residency at L'Autre Canal in Nancy. Charbel and Paul begun to improvise during the breaks at the residency, with resulting sounds growing and developing into those of a common language. At the beginning of Summer they found themselves a home at studio Mer Noir in Paris, and laid down the tracks of their first album.

With the appropriately named 'They Promised Us A Bright Future, We Were Content With An Obscure Past' Good Luck In Death delivers an almost anti-futuristic and dreamlike manifesto that juxtaposes orchestrated minimalism against the luxuriance of dense melodic flights. Processed guitars played with the e bow, synthesisers and analogue machines casting shadows of their lazy kinetic journey, a dialogue in the strata of vaporous ambience. The duo borrows in equal measure from the introspective power-ambience of the most recent Mondkopf ('They Fall But You Don't' - In Paradisum, 2017) and the sensuous and crazy experiments of Charbel Haber's 'Of Palmtrees & Decomposition' (Discrepant, 2016). The musical drift blazing from East to West, the borders as blurred as the harmonies, modes, scales and emotions which give them shape and form. And through the waves of electric haze, emerging veiled from the dream, comes a prediction, a premonition, a prophecy, grainy and ecstatic, like a cloud of fire.