Chansard’s drawings also echo this message. The small, white, floating pieces of what looks like ice, on the front-cover artwork and on the inner sleeve, are ice glaciers that have been cut off from the land, as the earth’s temperature rises, and travel in the sea, where they melt away. The ghost-looking and snow-covered mountains in front of the large moon on the front-cover have started to melt, too.

So, are Delacave actually environmentalists? And if they are, do they address the impact of human activity on the environment employing clichéd claims about buying a reusable coffee cup and recycling waste, using pictures of cute birds and animals in danger of extinction, or do they use pictures from The Ugly Animal Preservation Society and their own individual agency, like members of leaderless grassroots environmental movements, away from mainstream politics (or no politics at all), to influence spontaneous action locally and at community level?

Delacave were part of an artistic collective called La Grande Triple Alliance Internationale de l’Est (the Great International Triple Alliance of the East), whose members lived between Metz, Strasbourg, Bruxelles and Rome. Seb Normal and Liliane Chansard would not only perform live together with their fellow Alliance members and collaborate in the studio, but also meet up at house parties, as they shared the same attitude to life – “a life without any form of compromise”, as some of them say. A film about that Alliance captures this in the humorous but sarcastic and ironic language of its members and in the directness and cynicism of their artistic output targeting Western consumer society.

But this humorous artistic expression is serious and not light at all, because it is critical. It is like political cartoons, also known as editorial cartoons. Political cartoons may look harmless and light at first, but their satirical content and biting humour makes people refer to them as weapons, with some newspaper cartoonists even addressing themselves as ‘hired assassins’.

Of course, Liliane Chansard’s illustrations are cartoon-like drawings. And although they may have been produced as political commentary, their use in a cultural context, as part of an artistic work that is independent of organised politics, allows greater flexibility of interpretation. Whereas editorial cartoons, whose entertainment function becomes secondary, are only understood in political terms. This single-lens reading has often made them seem unpleasant, shocking, and even offensive.

In 2017, for example, editorial cartoons were seen as offensive and were banned from an exhibition by a group of liberal politicians, an otherwise open-minded political orientation advocating democratic principles and values, such as freedom of expression, dialogue, and the rights of individuals. They were political cartoons from various Greek newspapers that had been sent to Brussels for the European Parliament exhibition “EU Turns 60: A Cartoon Party” (2017). According to the British Liberal Democrat politician who censored them, the Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Catherine Bearder, who was responsible for cultural and artistic events – before Britain’s departure from the EU, as the exhibition took place in 2017 – these cartoons included “controversial content”.

Some of them had been previously exhibited in Athens, at the 2016 exhibition ‘Sweet Europe’, which included cartoons made during Greece’s 2015 referendum on the country’s exit from the Eurozone and its 2016 UK equivalent, and they had simply been seen as critical of EU’s economic and security policies. Mrs Bearder’s rejection of these cartoons is understandable, because they undermined EU’s effort and ongoing concern to maintain an image for itself that promotes unity among member states and ideas of fairness and democracy.

One of them depicted a rag-wearing child refugee being saved by a medieval-Europe aristocrat, and its caption read, ‘Europe During War Always Takes Care of the Refugees She Generates”. This implied that EU’s promotion of a humanitarian image for itself was at least hypocritical. Dating from 1996, when war refugees came to Europe from Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and many other places, it raised questions about the root causes of war, Europe’s involvement in armed conflict, and Europe’s colonial past, to emphasise the fact that if Europe had prevented these wars, there would be no war refugees.

‘Europe During War Always Takes Care of the Refugees She Generates’ (1996), by Stathis.

At the same time, militaries are not only big carbon emitters, with aircrafts, ships and land vehicles being fossil-fuel intensive, including the arms industry with its huge manufacturing capacity and the transportation of military equipment, but also cause significant environmental damage during armed conflicts, with toxic gases, oil and gas leaks, or fires. Afghans, for instance, still experience air pollution and issues with their contaminated land and poisoned water, as a result of the US military intervention there, especially with the so-called Mother of All Bombs (MOAB), dropped by the US in 2017, triggering skin diseases in people, and degradation of agricultural soils that caused food insecurity, both locally and globally. But as the speakers from the recent COP28 summit’s panel The Climate Toll of War and Peace on Climate Action said, the amount of money flowing into military operations is exactly the money needed to develop fossil-fuel free energy solutions to slow down global warming. Also, the only thing that can enable dialogue between countries, for international cooperation and global agreements that will tackle our environmental challenges, is peace.

So, it is not a coincidence that Liliane Chansard has chosen a form of graphic art for Every Night is A Moon Rising (2023) that is as critical as political cartoons. Editorial cartoons capture in naive-looking images the complex reality of political diplomacy and geostrategic agendas, and at the same time they look very simple. This simplicity is her tactic. It makes her fictional characters more real and the stories of the album believable.

The music also does this. Delacave have written sweet and simple synth melodies to blur imagination and reality and make their message convincing. And although they create bizarre and strange sounds, by drowning their synths in special effects, they use them in moderation, keeping the songs direct and unpolished. So, in the end, after the closing track, An Escape in Headlights (another masterpiece), you think their message, “every atom of our being is nature”, is straightforward and simple, and not at all complicated or difficult to understand.

Of course, our planet is a complicated system, with everything being interconnected. That’s why we keep failing to reverse the destructive trends of human-made climate change. We approach the multidimensional climate and biodiversity problems as single issues, rather than complex and interlinked with other problems. We introduce economic or technological fixes, for example, without considering their undesirable effects, as was the case with energy made from soy, which had a series of unexpected outcomes: the demand for more land to grow soy led to loss of rainforest, which resulted in both loss of wildlife and reduced ability of forests to cool the climate, the high price of soy made farmers switch to soy growing for fuel, decreasing food availability and increasing food prices, which caused food insecurity, and the transport of the biomass around the world by highly-polluting freight ships hadn’t been accounted for, either.

We are therefore told that the man-made problems facing our planet can only be tackled if we look at the world through a big-picture lens and approach it as one big system, to enable a change of values, mindsets, habits, and even systems of governance, for a wholesale transformation of society. Because apart from the so-called environmental crisis, we also go through economic ‘crises’ all the time, the massive health ‘crisis’ that we recently experienced, food and energy ‘crises’, as well as ‘migrant crises’, which is the name given by the media to the movement of displaced populations from one place to another as a result of war, interventionist regime-changes, or long droughts. All these ‘crises’ are interlinked.

So, it is probably obvious by now how Delacave’s stories compare with the environmental concerns we see on mainstream media, which use celebrity climate-activists, like Guardian-readers’ favourite, the Swedish student Greta Thunberg, to greenwash high-status politicians, who pose with them to gain people’s support and continue creating new wars, establish global banks to fund technological or economic fixes that will not work, and even finance spy operations through self-proclaimed environmentalists, who operate under the guise of environmentalism and are presented in Western media as founders of charity organisations concerned with the endangered Asiatic cheetah.

More importantly, using the term ‘crisis’, which is associated with mental stress or natural disasters and other unexpected natural phenomena, our governments and the media that support them create the impression that our current ‘crises’ are also natural phenomena that occur suddenly. This helps shift the attention away from human involvement, preventing us from seeing that, in reality, the environmental, economic, health and other problems we experience are man-made.

With albums like Delacave’s Every Night Is A Moon Rising (2023), it becomes obvious that there are some artists – not Delacave – who are deeply concerned with the environmental damage caused by human activities, and address the problem of using animal fur, for example, or consuming meat products (which is great that they point these things out), but there are also artists, such as Delacave, who do not blame people for these problems, but look at the bigger picture and put the issue in the right context, that of powerful elites controlling governments and turning people into passive consumers. Delacave’s approach is a more original form of creative environmental action, and it may turn out that it will have a more lasting impact and be more effective.

Chris Salatelis

The album A Story of A Global Disease (2022) by Marseille-born and Brussels-based musician Naomie Klaus also relates to fake things that are made to look genuine. It is based on an idea about the Japanese Tower in Brussels and the Japanese Gardens that surround it. The Japanese Tower was constructed during 1901-1904 by orders of King Leopold II of Belgium, who had admired a similar tower, a Japanese pagoda, at an international world fair of commerce, the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris, and purchased it immediately. The King then asked the French architect Alexander Marcel to modify it and re-build it for him in the gardens of his Royal Palace in Brussels. When it was completed, he promised to transfer it to the nation after his death, so when he died in 1909, it was passed to the Belgian state.

The album was recorded during the recent pandemic for the project ‘On the Go’ by a Brussels arts organisation. The project invited artists to share art with the public, while restrictions were still in place, by making music to accompany walks throughout Brussels. Klaus decided to write music for a walk in the park around the Japanese Tower. Today, the Japanese Tower is administered by a public organisation within the City of Brussels authority which uses it as a museum, the Museum of the Far East. Visitors can admire not just the architecture and the surrounding gardens, but also the building’s decorative elements, including furniture and stained-glass windows, and a collection of art objects relating to the Belgian-Japanese relations throughout the years of cultural and economic exchange between the two countries.

Klaus herself describes the album as a collection of songs about ‘the artificial paradises of globalisation’. Using a range of electronic equipment to filter voice, drum-kits, and trigger synths, she expands on the idea that copies of famous cultural artefacts – like the Japanese Tower – can be enjoyed as exotic spectacles outside of the country they were made, to talk about global communication, free trade, and the problems of a consumer society. Songs such as ‘Can I Be Your Gheisha?’, ‘Crocodile Skin Shoes’, ‘Tourism Workers’, and ‘Can You Tell Me What Is Micronet?’, question the idea that the world is a tightly-woven international community with strong cultural and economic links (through international exhibitions or festivals and inter-governmental trade agreements).

During the pandemic, the word ‘globalisation’ was used by government officials around the world to mean cooperation between nations. The reality, however, was completely different, as the world is actually divided into separate nations with clearly defined borders. Governments of powerful nations competed with each other, prioritising the nation instead of the good of the humankind, and causing disagreements among them with their nationalistic decisions to buy enough vaccine supplies or large quantities of personal protective equipment (PPE) for themselves, rather than sharing them across the world.

The picture of a typical Japanese dish on the album cover also reminds the argument about globalisation by the sociologists Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta, who believe that globalisation does not flatten out cultural diversity but adds more and more layers to it. For Ichijo and Ranta, the promotion of national cuisine as a brand, for example, is a form of nationalism. National cuisine offers nations a form of ‘soft power’ (unlike the military and economic ‘hard’ power) – a term used in gastrodiplomacy to mean a state’s power to enhance its prestige and appeal using its ‘traditional’ cuisine in international relations. Mediterranean cuisine, for instance, is associated with health and wellbeing, because of its nutritional value, as is Japanese cuisine, because of its association with light eating due to its use of seafood and vegetables as main ingredients. Nations are supported in this, as there are many inter-governmental initiatives, such as UNESCO’s global list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, or smaller cross-national schemes such as European Union’s Protected Geographical Status framework, which increasingly link food items to specific geographical areas. By identifying products as originated in a specific region, not allowing other countries to market them under these names, Cornish butter, Scotch whiskey, Brussels sprouts, Jersey Royal potatoes, Greek Feta cheese, Frankfurter or Cumberland sausages, and about another thousand food items, help nations exploit food’s appeal for economic growth and support the tourism industry to strengthen their private sector.

A closer look at the image on the album front cover reveals that the bowl with a Japanese soup and the chopsticks are not real but artificial. This makes it a matching image for an album about ‘the artificial paradises of globalisation’. The Belgian artist and art educator ‘Harrison’ (real name Joël Vermot), who created it and made it look like real food, encourages the listener to consider the spread of globalisation in relation to not only the McDonaldisation of the world, but also the international promotion of national cuisines in general. Taiwan, for example, who is not widely recognised as an independent state, and its territory and sovereignty are in dispute, launched an official food campaign to ensure diplomatic survival. The campaign involved Taiwanese food festivals abroad, the establishing of a Taiwanese ‘culinary think tank’, Taiwanese culinary tours, etc. By marketing Taiwan as an interesting country and enhancing its international image, the country hoped to promote its products as attractive to global consumers.

So, depending on how food is used globally, even highly nutritious recipes and genuinely healthy culinary suggestions can be ‘deleterious’ to the world’s health – to use Friedrich Accum’s term. After all, food can function like any other cultural artefact that helps shape a country’s self-image, international status, and reputation. In fact, Belgium (today the capital of the EU) had seen a number of other commissions by King Leopold II before the Japanese Tower in Brussels, that included monuments, museums, and schools, bringing him much praise, as well as the nickname “the builder king”. This effort has been recently seen as an attempt to erase from the nation’s memory (and globally) his bad reputation, because of the human atrocities committed by Belgium in central Africa during his reign. He wanted to be remembered as a beneficent ruler who gifted beautiful buildings and gardens to the nation.

This album is the 2022 release, which was made only on vinyl and in digital format. It had been made available on tape earlier, in 2021, and with a different album cover too. The tracks  from the tape have now been remastered, by the Dutch producer Rude 66, and a bonus track has been added as well.

Chris Salatelis

Delacave started making music in a very intimate space, a bedroom, discovering and gathering all the necessary imagination for their slow gestation to initiate Gloomy Wave.

In this fourth album, Liliane Chansard and Seb Normal intermingle their melodies even more, their harmonies sound and dissonance, and their voices adjust. Feverishness becomes strength. The different elements are linked in a blurred gap between coloured impressionism and black baroque.

They take us on a journey through the great nowhere on disparate grounds where the efforts that cannot be avoided are never in vain. The strength of lack, the wisdom of emptiness and loss, and the intensity of friendships and discoveries never perish and are always renewed.

LP / Digital Album

After a crush at the Brussels World Fair in 1900, King Leopold II decided, for his own personal pleasure, to have the Japanese Tower and Japanese Gardens built. In order to create this little relocated asian paradise, he had the wood, sculptures, paintings, ornaments, trees, workers and their know-how imported. For a few years he invited his entourage to enjoy it during large banquets and private receptions. He then had the idea of transforming the Japanese Tower into a luxury restaurant, but he died. This magnificent place remains closed to the public except during an annual opening.

“A Story of a Global Disease” is a short tale about artificial paradises of globalisation, a melancholic walk through the exotic relics of free trade, where whim, appropriation and appearances take precedence over otherness. Here, geishas eat chips, europeans confuse Tokyo and Beijing, and tribal ceremonies begin with samples and drumkits.

LP / Digital Album

Rio’s debut album is the next to come raw gem, enlighted & enshaped by Teenage Menopause Records for your ears only.

Dark and luminous, naive and serious, Rio mixes opposites. Duo formed during confinement by these two cuties : Maxime (Pilori Prod) and Lio (Le Prince Harry, Komplikations…), Rio deploys a soundscape that is disturbing like the mist and bewitching like the song of the sirens.

Reminding the best french associations, naïve as Elie et Jacno, depth dwelling as Ruth, Rio is a path.

LP / Digital Album

In 2017, Tsirihaka Harrivel, circus artist, multi-instrumentalist jack of all trades, begins writing this album which will become “The Dimension”, knowing already that it would form the basis of an upcoming performance. He then draws from this intended music the impetus for a narrative frame: it is in fact a soundtrack in reverse.

Tsirihaka builds the soaring atmosphere of this album around an inspiring 1983 Italian groove box featuring synthetic violins and an intriguing rhythm machine. The elliptical lyrics and the breakthroughs of sound participate in this impossible quest where any exit inevitably seems to elude.

The album was produced with Pierre Desprats (music from the films of Bertrand Mandico) who, with his experience of pop and cinema, has managed to keep the energy to several entries of this false album: association of ideas, tragic effect and illustrative music.

LP / Digital Album

Long-time friends, and trustful party partners , the Brussels duo, Techno Thriller, joins the Teenage Menopause Records family with a batch of slow and cranky misshapes.

During the past decade, we’ve linked them with the filthy EBM and chopped Indus-Techno they’re performing during massive lives, stabbing the dark rooms audiences. Two albums released on both l’Entorse and the Brussels’ pioneer Unknown Precept, integrating the C12 agency, they scoured Europe, releasing some smoky tracks, for those who love cinderblocks, leather and sweat. On the strength of this impeccable resume, they’re offering, now for Teenage Menopause, a free-reading of the Decameron: a 10 texts chronicle, by the florentine Boccace, describing the spread of the Great Plague of 1352 in his city.

While exploring the limits of new sounds, expanding electronic music, Techno Thriller looks back into their medieval influences, sharpening the blades on the literature of British authors, cutting guts on dark folk moods. The rhythms are slow, the gears are dedicated to building a dark and gloomy feeling, helped by featurings like Naomie Klaus or violinist Tamara Goukassova.

LP / Digital Album

Here is the third album from one of the most prolific artist of our time. From cheaptunes made from toys, to extrem noise terror, Luca’s music and art surround us from the Teenage Menopause’s early age. Further and deeper in the in-between zone, this one assumes Autotune arrangment, exploring the daily psychoses and the random paranoïa.

Once again, Luca aka Ventre de Biche releases and album on its own. Lyrics, music, sounds and arrangement, he even draws comic strips and artwork covers.

LP / Digital Album

Le Prince Harry is back on the map ! Ready to burn it down in this Elzo Durt‘s jacket!

Recorded in Liège aka ToxCity between June and July 3048 under an acid rain of melted iron. Things ain’t going well…

LP / Digital Album

Entre dessin, tentatives collectives ou Soundclouds privés, Luca Retraite, électron libre de la Triple Alliance de l’Est, produit inlassablement dans toutes les directions des OVNI qui font mouche à chaque fois. Ventre de Biche (alias romantico-ville dortoir) nous sert pour la seconde fois un pur produit de son imaginaire prolifique.

Ici, c’est la France des ronds points, des mains moites et des abris-bus qu’il s’approprie et revendique. Sur la froidure des instrus, il pose le réalisme de ses paroles qu’il enrubanne de Vocoder : une urgence à laquelle répond un vide absolu, une vacuité de l’existence sur fond de Bontempi.

Une bien belle bande son pour l’automne qui s’annonce !

LP / Digital Album