Monolithe - Black Hole District - CD DIGIPAK

Parisian Progressive Doom Metal outfit Monolithe returns with “Black Hole District”, a tech noir styled story!

Album concept:
Black Hole District is a story in a Tech-Noir style, inspired by Blade Runner, but also Dark City, Matrix, Ghost in The Shell, as well as “hard boiled” literature. The narrator lives in a decaying city, in a dystopian future. The moon has left its orbit and is coming dangerously close to Earth, causing increasingly violent cataclysms (earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.). Humans now live at night because it is too hot during daytime.
This narrator is disturbed by recurring dreams in which a woman with long black hair speaks to him. However, he doesn’t remember who she is. He decides to investigate to find her. He ends up reaching a forbidden part of the city, called “Black Hole District”. He enters a building which is actually an android factory. He then realizes that the faces of the inert and aligned androids being manufactured, are all the same... And identical to his own. His break-in causes an alarm during which he, through the confusion, sees the woman of his dreams among the employees. He flees and tries to leave the city, pursued by a militia charged with “removing” him; Because androids that have become “sentient” and can think for themselves are considered defective and dangerous. As he reaches the city limits, he gets fatally shot. At the same time, the city begins to disintegrate, due to the Moon’s increasing proximity.

The Music:
Black Hole District is part of the band’s evolutionary logic since their beginnings: progression in continuity. If Monolithe’s musical style remains identifiable, new influences and musical desires enrich each new album. This is the case with BHD, which drew on the aesthetics of the 1970s and 1980s, especially in terms of synthesizers, in particular with the use of the famous CS-80 synth popularized by Vangelis, and the appeal of soundtracks of science fiction films. The album is also designed as a movie would be, with a scenario, an atmosphere, a central character whose train of thoughts is provided to the listener through narrations in a “hard boiled” detective style. Eager to offer original music, Monolithe does not hesitate to break the rules of its primary genre, Doom Metal, while preserving its substantial marrow and roots.

Band biography:
After more than two decades of existence, ten studio albums, a live album and two mini-albums, the longevity and now respectable discography of Monolithe are the first witnesses of the intense activity of this band that has become a veteran of the international underground Doom Metal scene.
As a cult and iconoclastic formation, Monolithe has always offered very personal music in many respects. After a series of four albums composed of a single, slow, hypnotic and long Extreme Doom song - “The Great Clockmaker” saga, composed of the Monolithe I (2003), Monolithe II (2005), Monolithe III (2012) and Monolithe IV (2013) albums, the band then systematically provided compositions with rigorously equivalent durations: fifteen-minute pieces on Epsilon Aurigae (2015) and Zeta Reticuli (2016), seven minutes on Nebula Septem (2018) and four and eight minutes on Okta Khora (2020), albums that are chaptering “The Tame Stars” saga which, behind their eerie formalism are, above all, demanding, innovative and immersive Doom Metal works.

The release of Kosmodrom (2022) sees the French getting an interest in, beyond the cosmic immensity and the grandiose stories of interstellar science fiction, the human being and his fascination for discovery, throughout the history of the space race, seen from the Soviet side.

The tenth album, Black Hole District, returns to a more formal SF and questions artificial intelligence and the accessibility of machine consciousness, while paying homage to cult movies such as Blade Runner mainly, notably through the Tech-Noir aesthetic and the use of the famous CS-80 synthesizer which Vangelis used to compose the score.