THE HISTORY OF PANTHER BURNS' CONJURATIONS by Erik Morse 2010

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
Victor Hugo

The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
Alfred Jarry

Many years in the making, CONJURATIONS: Séance for Deranged Lovers is a unique glimpse into the heart of postmodern demimonde collective Panther Burns and its grand vampyr artist, Tav Falco. Like the masks that Falco references throughout the album, those traditional, secretive devices of debauchery, anonymity and lineage, CONJURATIONS invokes a mysterious rite of passage for the thirty year old group, which has weathered two generations of musical influence and yet remained steadfast in its bohemian-cum-situationist approach to recording.

Initially conceived by the musician as a memoir of sorts under the title of The Argentine Diaries, Falco, whose profound attraction to Buenos Aires is already well documented, began setting his written entries to music while in New York. Four years and many studio-sessions later, the band had created a roughly-hewn skeleton of album demos which Falco solicited to independent labels throughout America, Europe and Japan. Alas, the answer by A&R execs was a resounding NO. Instead, they offered up any number of “suggestions” of how to change the Panther Burns concept to make it more popular and more profitable. And the answer from Falco – an equally intransigent NO. See, Falco knew he had something rarefied in those recordings. The way he saw it was this – what a critic doesn't understand, he despises, and what a label finds strange and new, it discards as rubbish. Forget the rhetoric; when a righteous record man finds a sound, a vision, that is like no other, the result is ineluctable. So against the grain, despite the odds, CONJURATIONS was hatched when that other renegade, Stag-O-Lee, tipped his Stetson hat and shot Poor Billy – from whose blood, spilt on the barroom floor, sprung the album now in your very hands.

This album is another death-mask, another imagine, in the secret lararium of the blues. It as much about heritage as it is about mystery, as much about identity as it is about anonymity, as much about oratory as it is about soliloquy. Falco has tended to its creation under the watchful eyes of his musical ancestors: Feathers, Burnside, Dickinson, et. al., and presents the results of the séance in rich, stereophonic fidelity. It has not been an easy adventure. CONJURATIONS has travelled for many moons, down lonely American roads and bustling Parisian avenues, endured many humming
machines, crossed many desks, and tread a long and fabled heritage, to reach its final destination.

Ballad of the Rue de la Lune
A Parisian street nocturne. The story of a a beguiled lodger, his love and the third man all connected by the Rue de la Lune – the pathway beneath the moon. In the Panther Burns mythology, the boulevard always drifts inexplicably to the blind alleyway and the terrifying coeur du miracle, the den of thieves. The City of Light is, despite Baron Haussmann's best intentions at luminosity, a darkened theatre of caresses, flirtations and conjurations. It is rootless, a paved stage separating the surface world from the fecund soil, and permanently adumbrated by the spindly concrete towers which blot out the moralizing sun. Here, traditions of the real world are suspended for the pursuit of concupiscent pleasures. Here the faint clop of shoes upon the stairwell and the errant serenades of the fiddler are the sounds of great opera. Here on the rue de la Lune.

Sympathy for the Mata Hari
One of two songs on CONJURATIONS that extols the sordid “intelligence” of the female spy, “Sympathy...” might be considered the flip-side of rock 'n roll's great plea for diabolical tolerance composed by the Rolling Stones some forty years ago. Leave it to Falco to show up Jagger and Richards by announcing that the Devil is not a wandering troubadour who plans war and pestilence but a jet-setting double agent who toys with men's hearts.

Chamber of Desire
Like the libertine cabinets of Godard d'Aucour's Thémidore or Vivant Denon's Point de lendemain, “Chamber of Desire” is a celebration of ce lieu de délices, the room of pleasures. The Chamber of Desire is deep within the House and indiscernible to strangers. One must be invited to tour its location or else risk never being able to leave. It is not within the attic, nor is it in the deep bowels of the basement, though many would mistakenly hazard these common domestic extremities. No, it is in the center, in the very heart of the House. It is small and austere in design – only a mattress and a mirror. What goes on behind the curtain is indescribable, the utmost pain and the most satisfying of pleasures. But in its absence there is no House, no interior, no “inside”.

Administrator Blues
Panther Burns is not above taking a good, clean shot at big-business milquetoasts and so “Administrator Blues” is the most sardonic and vituperative of the twelve songs on CONJURATIONS. Set to an errant 12 bar cotton-patch blues rhythm, and in the coruscating style of Leadbelly's “Bourgeois Blues” (which Panther Burns covered on Behind the Magnolia Curtain) and Jimmy Reid's “Big Boss Man”, Falco's Administrator is a profligate wheeler 'n dealer of the Wall St. bailout era, fattening his pocket on the financial misfortunes of the poor and elderly. But when the bottom drops out on this serial cheater and onanist, the only escape is a leap from his cushy, urban nest to the cold, hard reality below.

Tango Fatale
The music of the tango has been a part of the Panther Burns cri de coeur since Falco visited Argentina and learned the secrets of this ancient tradition from los milongueros. Falco has incorporated the haunting choreography into the band's live set for years and he, himself, can often be found lurking about the dance halls of Vienna entangled in tango's seductive gesticulations. The “Tango Fatale” is a celebration of the forbidden dance, its evocations of passion, immolation and intoxication, born beneath the scorching embrace of the Buenos Aires sun. In its syncopations, glissades, and corte quebradas, the tango returns the body to Man: the curve of the back, the thrust of the hip, the swell of the heart. It is, as George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “...the vertical expression of a horizontal desire.” This one is a deadly tango danced with a knife, Falco has stuck in the side of his partner... who smells like a goat and is twice as mean.

Budapest
“Budapest” takes the Siderodromophilia (passion for trains) of traditional American blues and rockabilly (from “Pea Vine Blues” to “Mystery Train” and “Train Kept a Rollin'”) and transports it to the vampyric Near East of Bram Stoker's imagination. A stranger has boarded the Orient Express to eradicate his identity, escape a crime, forget his former love. The chugging engine and the steam whistle of the train are his only companions, conveying him in secret to Budapest, a land of mystery and repose. Perhaps a vampire or simply a grifting cad, the narrator of “Budapest” seeks out this interstitial space between East and West so that he might start his life anew.

Secret Rendez-vous
Another tango-inspired reverie on forbidden passion – with instrumental hints of bandeoneon, cello and tambourine – set in the bedroom rather than the dance-floor. If there is any doubt that the secret of Panther Burns lies in its titular namesake, the panther, “Secret Rendez-vous” will dispel such confusions. The lure of the animal has always been the secret knowledge of Falco. For lust is neither crude, nor dishonorable, it as pure and fantastical as the predatory instinct of the wild cat. The bedroom is the habitat and hunting-ground of the Lothario in “Secret Rendez-vous”, the magical setting where he eats and sleeps and dreams. Like “Chamber of Desire”, this song invokes interiority as the ultimate expression of desire.

Garden of the Medicis
A musical pastiche of Jorge Luis Borges, “Monster Mash” and the honeyed melodies of the carnival calliope, “Garden of the Medicis” is one of the most enchanting moments of CONJURATIONS. Using the Florentine villas of the Medici family for inspiration, Falco narrates a midnight wanderer, who stranded in a prelapsarian paradise, struggles to evade the feminine beauty that besets him on all sides. Je ne veux pas voir un autre joli visage. A twisted fairy-tale in miniature, further evoked by the dulcet tones of a harpsichord, “Garden...” feels like a kind of sinister fable – of a lover banished or condemned to beauty that he cannot touch.

Lady from Shanghai
Using Welles' 1947 noir masterpiece for inspiration, “Lady from Shanghai” spotlights Panther Burns' continued fascination with classic cinema and soundtrack music. Built on an insistent and catchy bassline alongside exotic drum beats and cymbals, the song is an homage to the kind of maudlin, espionage thrillers that Welles and novelist Graham Greene excelled at creating. Someone has been shot, another cast overboard to the hungry sharks, while a mysterious femme fatale and her new beau have fled the murder scene. Is it a ruse? Who will take the fall? In truly pessimistic fashion, the maligned suitor only realizes his grave mistake while on the way to the gallows.

Gentleman in Black
Mephistopheles. There’s a gentleman in black who travels alone,/down dark streets and roads forlorn. Signor Montoni. A man without a country, a man without a home,/ he travels fastest, who travels alone. Melmouth. The women he’s known have all forgotten his name,/and the new ones he meets can sense he’s strange. Maldoror. Pimps and hustlers are his audience by choice,/though their clients never seem to hear his voice. Arsène Lupin. He leaves the people hanging to just sit and stare/ at a few moments of brilliance in a lifetime of despair. Zigomar. A spotlight shines on his blue-black hair/ for a few moments of brilliance in a lifetime of despair. Fantomas. And if you haven’t guessed – now you will see/ the entertainer dressed in black is me. Gentleman in Black.

Phantome Demoiselle
A languid country-blues recalling the baroque prairie ballads of Lee Hazlewood or Sanford Clark, “Phantome Demoiselle” is another eccentric highlight on CONJURATIONS. Coquettes and ladies of the night may be popular characters in Panther Burns' recurring dramatis personae, but they are hardly passive canvases to be molded or exploited. In Falco's songwriting universe, the seductress is as wily as the Lothario but her ambiguous identity ultimately makes her more powerful. While the corrupted and sinister man always festoons himself in black, the demoiselle may appear in the leather and lace of a streetwalker or the ermine and pearls of a debutante. But, make no mistake – the grander the fashion, the deeper the plunge.

Conjurations of Masks
The final selection, “Conjuration of Masks”, is invoked in a Walpolian castle...behind the gothic lace drapes of Otranto...where all vestiges of one's identity must be surrendered...sacrificed to honor the deities, namely Dionysus, whose image had been desecrated by Machiavellian black princes, in collusion with the banker class, through the pursuit of blind profit derived from desperate and needless wars against humanity.


CONJURATIONS: Séance for Deranged Lovers – just recorded in a secret studio in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on Paris' Left bank – is the definitive masterpiece of the Panther Burns. Refining the themes explored by the group over their career: unrequited love, betrayal, and lost causes, the new record, is composed of all original songs.
CONJURATIONS consummates Falco's vision with a particularly poetic, yet turbulent thrust. His exceptional voice, described by one journalist, as sounding like Marlene Dietrich under torture, evokes the phenomenal fires of the Panther Burns and is supported by a rock-solid line-up of players devoted to the band over the past decade: Giovana Pizzorno – drums; Grégoire Cat – guitar; Laurent Lanouzière – bass. Guests on the album include the elegant French producer, Bertrand Burgalat on harpsichord, and Olivier Manoury, maestro of the bandoneon. The new album is produced and released by Stag-O-Lee Records.

In a contemporary art and music world full of burnouts and fly-by-nighters, Tav Falco remains a cordial and erudite gentleman who continues to run, God willin., on train time.

- Erik Morse 2010

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