Komintern used to abandon their own gear mid-set. The amps would keep howling feedback while the band walked off the stage and sat down among the crowd, a stunt less interested in shock for its own sake than in making the audience wonder who was actually performing for whom. Political tracts got read aloud between songs. Masks came out. Subtlety wasn't the point.
The band formed in Paris in May 1970, when drummer Serge Catalano and saxophonist Francis Lemonnier walked out of Patrick Vian's Red Noise and joined guitarists Michel Muzac and Pascal Chassin and bassist-keyboardist Olivier Zdrzalik-Kowalski. Violinist Richard Aubert, nicknamed the Paganini of Pop Music by people who clearly meant it as a joke that turned out to be accurate, arrived early in 1971, just in time for the record.
Le Bal Du Rat Mort, named for a notorious Pigalle cabaret, came out that year on Harvest.
Side one is a single seventeen-minute piece, opening with a mangled quotation of "Bandiera Rossa," the Italian communist anthem, before swerving into "Los Cuatro Generales," a Spanish Civil War song, and dissolving into an instrumental passage where saxophone, violin and guitar pursue each other in circles without ever quite catching up. Side two turns shorter and stranger still, ending with "Fou, Roi, Pantin," its lyrics lifted from Arthur Rimbaud and sung over a horn section that includes trumpeters Fred Gérard and Pierre Thibaud and accordionist Joss Baselli. The record's closest French relative is Gong's early work, though Komintern trade Gong's cosmic whimsy for something closer to a picket line with better musicianship.
Underneath the noise sits real organisation.
Komintern were among the founders of F.L.I.P., a short-lived alliance of bands committed to turning pop's own machinery against itself, and the following year they scored Fernando Arrabal's play Bella ciao at Paris's T.N.P. Chaillot for a multi-month run. "Fou, Roi, Pantin" was named single of the week on José Artur's Pop-Club radio show, an odd mainstream foothold for a band built around confrontation.
By 1973 the original lineup had scattered. Catalano and Chassin left, and Gilbert Artman, soon to found the more purely instrumental Lard Free, passed through a final version of the group before it folded altogether. What survives on Le Bal Du Rat Mort is the sound of a band that hadn't yet decided whether it was a rock group, a political cell or a piece of theatre, and never bothered resolving the question before it split.
