fantomas
Fantômas are comprised of four rock musicians making distinctly un-rock music. Vocalist Mike Patton is currently the singer in a Tomahawk and Peeping Tom. His famous larynx formerly supplied Faith No More and Mr Bungle with their operatic vocal dynamics. He is also the owner of Ipecac Recordings, who have released all four of the Fantômas records. Guitarist Buzz Osbourne (aka King Buzzo) is in the Melvins - the Aberdeen, Washington trio who invented most types of rock music. Trevor Dunn plays bass, his former assignments include Mr Bungle and collaborations with legendary saxophonist John Zorn. Percussion is provided by Dave Lombardo, who recently returned to Slayer after having played on their classic albums South of Heaven and Reign in Blood.
The band are named after the hero of a French cop film.
Responsible for one of the most eclectic catalogs of recent memory, Fantômas return with Suspended Animation, a thirty-track set that both celebrates the art of cartoon composition and the many reasons to behold the fourth month of our calendar, April (with one piece for each day of the month). Who knew that April is subtitled 'national humor and anxiety month'? Who knew that the dreaded April 15 was actually titled 'That Sucks Day' or that April 24 marks the beginning of 'National Karaoke Week'? Leave it to the creative minds behind Fantômas to enlighten us to the many forgotten holidays throughout April.
Fantômas' three previous releases have regaled listeners with a sci-fi homage (Fantômas, 1999), a celebration of the best in film composition (Director's Cut, 2001) and a one song album (Delirium Cordia, 2004). As Rolling Stone said in their review of Delirium Cordia: "One epic seventy-four minute noise-rock song. What's not to like?" Now with Suspended Animation, the quartet delves headlong into a new and recently unexplored genre... cartoon music. Recorded in the Spring of 2003, during the same sessions as surgically precise Delirium Cordia, Suspended Animation is the yang to Delirium Cordia's ying. Bright and loose, Patton describes the new album as "nursery rhymes, cartoon sound effects and choppy arrangements".
As with all Ipecac releases, the artwork and packaging are just as integral to unfolding the full story as the piece of music, Suspended Animation is no different. Perhaps the most intricate packaging to date, the thirty page booklet/calendar is illustrated by Asian pop cartoonist Yoshimoto Nara. In a recent San Francisco Bay Guardian feature, Nara's influential style was described as "cartoonlike images and sculptures of kids and puppies - sporting world-weary adult expressions, major attitude and salty vocabularies". The paper went on to say that Nara's pieces are among the most cutting edge of Japanese exports in the contemporary art world.
