Borja Flames

His head is that of a pope, a king, a lion, a faun or a melancholy centaur. He’s well dressed, with pellet holes and a Merovingian beard. We met him in June et Jim, where he was the southern face (in the other hemisphere: Marion Cousin), a duo recently transfigured under the name Catalina Matorral, a true electronic pastoral.

Nuevo Medievo, released in 2022 (Les Disques du Festival Permanent / Murailles Music), is even more beautiful and astonishing. Right from the start, sung on tiptoe, the voice silvered with robotic effects over a synthetic bedside rug spiked with cymbals, you feel bareheaded in a vast cabinet of stars, captivated. There are laser beams and vocoder oracle lyrics. Paul Loiseau, the Morse drummer, makes the whole kitchen sound like an orchestra of stoned calculators, then Borja Flames speeds up the record’s pulse with the diction of an ill-tempered TV newsreader against a jungle backdrop before Marion Cousin and Rachel Langlais turn everything upside down with their saturnine vocals and bizarrely tuned synths.

From there, the hits, the real ones, rain down like asteroids.