Save Us From The Archon – L’Eclisse (2016)

It is no surprise that Save Us From The Archon‘s latest effort L’Eclisse is a fiery blaze of instrumental post-hardcore with complex melodic riffs and interwoven dreamy interludes. So I’m going to go straight to their ostensible love of film, as I am constantly wont to do.

L’Eclisse was one of Michael Antonioni(oni)’s finest films, and arguably one of the great films of the 20th century. It tells the romantic entanglement and eventual drift between estranged woman Vittoria and her mother’s stockbroker, the young money grubbing Piero. Vittoria is in existential pangs looking for human connection; Piero is materialistic and money driven. Their love is fuelled by desires that are painfully unrequited, leaving the characters feeling as though they are ‘in foreign countries’. In the film’s poignant conclusion the pair agree to set their unsatisfied needs aside and just embrace each other every day, but neither show up to their next rendezvous. The film contains so many social commentaries and prophecies: how our insatiable thirst for capital and modernity drifts us away from the real nature of things; how our sexual and romantic freedoms tend to paralyse us and lead us to alienation. It is in many ways a work of genius.

This is presumably what SUFTA had in their minds when it came to writing this album. But there is an interesting juxtaposition in all this. L’Eclisse, much like Ali: Fear Eats The Soul (from which the name of SUFTA’s second EP is taken), is a film that is so rich due to its paucity for action. It’s much like what the great Paul Auster espoused in writing his story ‘Ghosts’: the lack of action almost forcefully maximizes the potential for individual introspection and constructive thought. Many of the great films, particularly Antonioni’s, expound monumental ideas and themes because they slow reality down. Yet SUFTA’s music is the opposite of all this: it is accelerated, enriched, almost lurid; it is beautifully melodic, almost cacophony. This contrast has always interested me, and will continue to do so throughout their career.