Steve Stapleton returns from his dalliance with easy-listening on Huffin’ Rag Blues with another surrealist menagerie of the grotesque. This Surveillance Lounge is overflowing with sinister phantasms, exhuming malevolent fantasies mapped out by Comte de Lautréamont’s foul anti-hero, Maldoror. Stapleton’s been here before, of course: his debut long-player, Chance Meeting On A Dissecting Table Of A Sewing Machine & An Umbrella, took its title from the pages of the Count’s most infamous horror story.
“I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of the sublime that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy.” In describing his own compositional methods, Lautréamont illuminates the atomic mechanisms inherent in Stapleton’s work. Nurse’s tapestries convey a sense of unease, a visceral feeling that cloaked assassins lie around the next corner, venturing beyond the smooth dark ambience of their black-vested peers. While screaming out its perversion with decadent pride, The Surveillance Lounge also fails to admit any light. That the “reader” is required to seek the “remedy” elsewhere – that is its one inherent flaw.
