
The Drift Institute
The Swiss artist NVST and the Breton Théo Muller met in the mountains of Ardèche where, by chance, they were able to share the turntables together for the first time for several hours with an insane emotion. Following this episode, despite the distance separating them and the many postponements of residences caused by the epidemic, the two artists met again to write an album in Brittany and then in Switzerland in less than two weeks between September and December 2021.
In this collaborative album mixing spoken word and trip hop rhythms, the producers invite their listeners to a deep dive into an esoteric universe where black magic is combined with political revolt to offer a complete and executory experience.
Overflowing with various musical influences (dark ambient, drone, industrial music, dub) the musical composition is a subtle mix of intoxicating melodies, enveloping metallic textures, and heady rhythms plunging the listener into a state close to bewitchment. This music invites you to indulge in this haunting trance that culminates in a sensory catharsis in some of the album’s more explosive phases.
But the alchemy also comes from the fusion of the senses and the “sense”, because in addition to the musical intoxication, emerges from the album a committed speech resting on the texts written and shouted by the musician NVST. Similar to mantras, these lyrics unfold in an acid criticism of modern society and denounce all its deviations: economic domination, the depravity of the capitalist system, police violence, and mass surveillance — so many deviances and injustices that invite awareness and revolt. But in the Drift Institute, the revolt is no longer only ideological, it becomes carnal because it is not reason that makes revolutions, it is bodies.
To take this discourse out of its literal dimension and bring it towards a supernatural and visceral experience, NVST and Théo Muller draw an atmosphere with powerful and enigmatic symbolic evocations. Borrowing from the codes of witchcraft and occult sciences, they deploy a strongly cinematographic universe and propose a narrative path centered around the figure of the Drift Institute. A mysterious secret society established in a castle with a gothic aesthetic, its mission is to purge evil from the world and its leaders during dark shamanic ceremonies. A terrifying process, but necessary for the advent of a more just world, free of its infamies.