Lemegeton Party is the narcotic and occluded industrial-ambient debut for the Junkie Flamingos, a project conceived in 2017 by Luca Sigurtà, Alice Kundalini, and Daniele Delogu. Each of these musicians has their distinctive sounds: Sigurtà with his vertiginous electronica, Kundalini best known as the author behind the death industrial project She Spread Sorrow, and Delogu in the bombastic folk of the Barbarian Pipe Band. Their collective amalgamation shifts but does not denude each of these aesthetics in the construction of this oblique, sidereal album.
Inspired by Freidrich Holderlin’s Hyperion, Lemegeton Party is gilded with a neoclassical sheen that alludes to both the divine and the diabolical. Kundalini’s whispered invocations which have so creepily effective in addressing psychosexually abject conditions in She Spread Sorrow are immediately recognizable here. Yet, she shifts the content towards messages of power and strength, even if cast in the shadows of desolation and solitude.
The arrangements ebb and flow upon a rhythmic spine of drum machines and cybernetic sequences, laden with acoustic instrumentation bathed in effects and treatments that all serve to bolster Kundalini’s allegorical declarations. To think of Coil’s post-MDMA experiments in chill-out isolationism wouldn’t be far from the mark, with the Junkie Flamingos making a dark ambient nod to the slow motion, proto-techno torpor of Elettronica Meccanica instead of ‘90s British rave culture.
Mastered by James Plotkin and photograph by Stefano Majno.
Cat. number: HMS051
Year: 2019