Originally released as a self production, on their own label Orcadia Machina in 1988, A Contresens is the band’s second album, successor to the legendary Cathdrale released three years before. A Contresens is undoubtedly, in hindsight, the band’s weirdest album. Its title (in english meaning something like in the wrong way...) was already sounding like a confession. Undoubtedly, OMS members had perhaps the inside feeling of being creating something very different from what could be done in those times in the musical alternative environment.
This album expresses a conscious or unconscious desire not to censor oneself in any way and not to sacrifice to any very defined musical fashion or trend. The lyrics, written by Patrick L.Robin and Franck Lopez, hermetic and obscure, borrow as much from symbolist poetry as from automatic writing, inspired by real or fantasized situations. The music explores some paradoxical and varied paths borrowing from new wave, medieval music, folk... The instruments used are also very diverse, both electronic and acoustic: keyboards, drum machines, guitars, hyper-flanged bass, dulcimer, psaltery, recorders... giving the arrangements of the eight tracks on the album a heterogeneous and disconcerting aspect. Like the monk who barely tries to kill himself with his ax on the album’s cover, this record was, a posteriori, most certainly expected as a kind of commercial suicide !
A Contresens had not been reedited for more than twenty years. This double vinyl and cd reissue by Wave Records and Young and Cold Records is therefore an opportunity to rediscover this very special period in the history of Opra Multi Steel. The vinyl and the cd are delivered in an artwork revisited by Hernan Czauski based on the used originally used illustrations. Both contain the entire lyrics of the album.
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