‘THE ALLEGORY OF VANITY’ TRACKLISTING :
CD1
- The Sands Of Time Prevail
- Prick
- You Should See The Other Guy
- Machiavelli
- Nomen Est Omen
- Type Grotesque
- Soliloquy
- Practical Dreamers
- The Right Is Wrong
- Where Once I Was, I Now Am Not (Pt I)
CD2
- Impermanence
- Resolution
There’s something of a Jekyll and Hyde paradox about the work of Cédric Pin and Glen Johnson. On the one hand, there’s their unashamedly ‘80’s electropop-referencing Future Conditional project, inspired by everything from Kraftwerk to Soft Cell. On the other, as testified by their 2020 album, ‘The Burning Skull,’ a darker fascination with unfashionable, oft-avoided themes, vanitas and memento mori.
The follow-up to that weighty, twenty track tome, is no less monolithic. Three years in the making, ‘The Allegory Of Vanity,’ reflects on the deception of time and how, particularly in the Internet Age, much of life is wasted on trivia and self-obsession.
Since 2020, Pin, recording in his sleepy home town of Alès, the capital of the Cévennes region of Southern France, swapped files with London-based, Johnson, each augmenting the other’s work with a variety of both electronic and acoustic instruments. Eventually, they met to mix the album with sound engineer, Jon Clayton, at OneCat recording studio in Crystal Palace, South London.
Peter Ulrich, former drummer/percussionist of Dead Can Dance, contributes ocarina and backing vocals to the opening track, ‘The Sands Of Time Prevail,’ as well as percussion to ‘Where One I Was, I Now Am Not (Pt.1).’ The Lewes-based, American artist, Josh Hight provides additional vocals to the EBM-inspired ‘Prick.’
Indeed Pin and Johnson’s inspiration for ‘The Allegory Of Vanity’ is mostly drawn from their obsessions with ‘80’s EBM, industrial music and Ivo Watts-Russell-era 4AD Records. Coil, Soisong (Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson’s project with Ivan Pavlov), Richard Chartier’s Pinkcourtesyphone and glacial music pioneer, Asmus Tietchens, have also found space on their collective pinboard.
‘The Allegory Of Vanity’ includes a bonus disc of solo work. Johnson’s ‘Impermanence’ first elaborates on the album’s original inspiration, a painting of the same name by the Spanish Baroque-era painter, Antonio de Pereda and via a labyrinth of dark ambient and industrial sounds, drops us off with Quentin Crisp’s sublimely optimistic take on death, “This is a message of hope. It will come to an end and we shall be free.”
Pin’s ‘Resolution,’ no less labyrinthic over the course of its twenty minutes or so, evokes nothing less than the end of everything, the absolute folding up of all we know until there is nothing (as it was at the beginning) but darkness.
Not yet exhausted by their three years of Sisyphian collaboration, a bonus, six track EP, ‘Nil Omne’ (lit. “All is trivial”) collects the no-less engaging deleted scenes from ‘The Allegory Of Vanity,’ including a more empyreal version of ‘Prick’ (as ‘Three Figures’) and the playful skeleton jig of ‘Danza Della Morte’ (lit. The Dance Of Death).
‘NIL OMNE’ TRACKLISTING :
- Three Figures
- The Clinic (after Derek Jarman)
- Semper Augustus
- Your Sadness & My Own
- Danza Della Morte
- Where Once I Was, I Now Am Not (Pt II)
Early bird customers had the opportunity to purchase one of forty 24K gold-plated, embossed, polished, commemorative coins designed by Cédric Pin (40mm x 3 mm). These are now sold out.
Buy/download/stream ‘The Allegory Of Vanity’ and ‘Nil Omne’ from the official Second Language Bandcamp page
