Chat Noir - Nine Thoughts For One Word

It’s been a few months since I’ve done a review from the label of RareNoise Records. I know, I’ve been a very busy man when it comes to listening and writing. One of the albums that has suddenly landed on my lap is a trio called Chat Noir. Now, mind you I’m very new to the band’s music, With five abums in the can from different labels including one from RareNoise also. This year, they have released their sixth album entitled Nine Thoughts For One Word.

They moved away from the Jazz sound and into Electronic/Experimental yet Atmospheric noises that just took me by eye-brows lit up with momentum and surprise. J. Peter Schwalm, whose best known for his work with Brian Eno and working together along with a film score of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Fear X released in 2003, replaces drummer Guiliano Ferrari.

What Chat Noir and Schwalm do is they bring a disturbing vision of the future. It feels as if the trio have collaborated together and worked on a film done in the styles of Refn, Alejandro Jordorowsky, David Lynch, Luis Bunuel, Ridley Scott, and Fritz Lang. Done in a silent-movie homage set in a black-and-white surreal dystopian film in 2046 as the music gives you a nightmarish and ominous tone.

I almost closed my eyes because some albums that I’ve mentioned as I would always say, “The movie inside your head.” Well, this one is definitely like a surreal/avant-garde/futuristic film that will confuse, guess, surprise, and blow you away for a midnight showing on Fridays and Saturdays if you are tired of seeing the same old Superhero movies, the music itself will give it a gigantic message of it.

Listening to this entire album, I always have this fascination of the styles of music between Lard Free, Neo-Classical, the Krautrock scene (NEU!, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Faust’s The Faust Tapes), David Bowie’s Low-era, bits of electronic Jazz, and of course Eno thrown into the mix. It echoes throughout the entire structure, but it is one of the scariest albums I’ve listened to.

Nine Thoughts for One Word is not an easy album to listen to, however this is I think in my opinion, the perfect choice of music for Halloween. I hope to see Chat Noir do more of this type of music for years to come. Eerie and Haunting momentum that will keep you guessing ‘til the very end. This is going to be one of my favorite albums of 2016 and RareNoise Records have scored another home run as Rutger Hauer’s character Roy Batty from Blade Runner says, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”