Frotting Christ
you ever feel like an artist makes music just for you? before i had even finished CRÈVE, i bought all of Ronce's releases. a harrowing standout album.
Favorite track: Fièvre (ft Exploited Body).
RONCE - CRÈVE
(DAWN020)
50 limited copies
CD
@itsronce
Produced by Zoë Villerd
Mastered by @lastrackqlf
Photos by Gabriel Cautain
Design by @hadji-hajj
Dawn 2023
credits
released November 22, 2023
Zoë Villerd’s fiercely uncompromising “feral ASMR gore” project ronce returns with a 3rd (and probably final) album for Hajj’s Dawn Records, notably featuring HTRK, Exploited Body, Seraphim, and more, helping her to process the trauma of abuse. It’s no doubt a deeply unsettling listen, but nevertheless a vital work of radical, experimental art by a brave and hugely distinctive artist.
Under a polysemous title translating to ‘pierce’ and ‘die’ in ronce’s native french, ‘Crève’ represents a nail in the coffin for the project which started with a shocking 7”, ‘Lolita / Acteon’ in 2020, and manifested as two albums in 2021, both cultishly praised for their uncompromising articulation of, in her own words, “the female form and all the traumas that are attached to it.”
More specifically, those records were based on her experience of abuse. It has since come to light that ronce’s abuser was someone embedded in London’s experimental and noise scene, who has since been jailed for heinous crimes. The worst. With some semblance of justice restored for those involved, that revelation only makes ronce’s recordings even more admirable for the way she dealt with the matter while tied by legal issues, and also more unsettling for the consequent realisation it was somebody involved with contemporary UK experimental music.
‘Crève’ is, like all ronce’s work, understandably a difficult record to write about. But it’s also a compelling one. Between her uncanny inversion of what is meant to be pleasurable stimulus on opener ‘ASMR’, to the relative relief of working with her personal heroes, HTRK, on the centrepiece ‘Lilac Blue’, thru the support of longtime peer Hajj on the industrial black metal menace of ‘All Girls are Special’, and its elegiac closer ’Never Cursed’; she expresses a broader emotional register here than on any previous recordings, and with an immovable, often shocking, conviction in her subversion of ambient and club production techniques.
Feelings of rage, disgust, masochism and self-acceptance are all negotiated within its tormented flux. As with her previous records, she leaves little room to hide from the demons across the album, but a heightened sense of maturity that comes with age (5 years have passed since she started the project) results in a more rounded record whose pain is still palpable, even though she’s the one in control. If a function of vital art is to impart a particular perspective on a subject, and maybe enlighten or alter the user’s own point of view, then ‘Crève’, and the entirety of ronce’s catalogue for that matter, brutally achieves its aims and should be held up as an exemplary work of early 2020’s sound art. One symptomatic and emblematic of the times, that bravely stares down what is a sadly timeless issue.
Boomkat
supported by 12 fans who also own “CRÈVE (DAWN020)”
what can I even say about this that I haven't already said about other claire albums. it's the first one I heard and also probably my favourite of hers katsumashi
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