Bernardino Femminielli is proud to present his first 2020 LP L’Exil. The album is composed of lost Plaisirs Américains sessions recorded in Montréal, Quebec. Lyrics were written and recorded in Paris and Berlin in 2019 and mixed again in Montréal in early 2020 by producer
Dominic Vanchesteing (Plaisirs Américains, Double Invitation). L’Exil is the “pre-conclusion” (Prequel / Part 0) to two other LP’s— Johnny 4ever (Part I) and Nobody’s Boy: Johnny (Part II)— which will be released later this year.

L’Exil (2020)

L’Exil, the album, the performance, the satire, took shape after the notorious arrest of Bernardino Femminielli by American border authorities during a US tour in 2018. Instantly, the American Pleasures, the American dream became obsolete, irrelevant, of the past. The showman and his anguished wife decide to abandon their failing restaurant, their debts and their meagre North American livelihood to wander the old continent in search of a fresh start.

L’Exil is an paradoxical anthem for the unsuccessful. An elegiac and lyrical autofiction in the form of a concept album. A satire of show business, a tribute to society’s outcasts and heroes— a story which tells of the financial, artistic and spiritual failure of the exiled American showman (Femminielli). We learn early that the showman has a desire to symbolize the contradictions of life. We learn that the showman is affected by a multitude of dissociativeidentity disorders. A visit of an angel named “Johnny” seems to make him believe in the existence of his double, who sadly does not come seeking camaraderie, but with malicious intentions. He's the employee, the boyfriend, the slave. The showman loves his wife because she looks like the showman. Johnny and the wife have become products of his tormented world. Spiritual and psychological cannibalism is rife, and all will be complicit in the showman’s atrocities.

The literary and cinematographic borrowings are here violently diverted from their proper meaning to tell the story in their own way. Pasolini’s Italy, Fassbinder’s Germany, The Years of Lead, Macronist France, police terrorism, paranoia, obsession with the double, substance addiction, money and marriage are all subjects touched upon with humor and despair. As the showman ominously cautions: You don’t argue with a sly dog, you break his teeth and his jaw.

Bernardino Femminielli, frustrated by his status as a misunderstood artist, has constructed a semi-fictional caricature of himself. A guy adrift, an anti-hero, the politeness of despair, a loser crooner who's lost his way. The album has many faces of the same distress: those of the victims of a system that marginalizes them. Repeated themes and catalysts present in the album:

One’s failure to achieve professional success can lead to unexpected volatility.

Exile is oppressive thus one must also transform into an oppressor.
Violence is a direct result of frenzied desperation.
Cannibal mechanics are often precipitated by financial devastation.
Self destruction becomes a means of self preservation.
Consumption always without moderation.
Money is earned, and then like life, it’s burned.

L’Exil contains four heterogeneous tracks. Two songs in pop format (track 2 and 4) and two long sessions of expressionism-narrative-free-jazz-prog with layered talk-over (track 1 and 3). Electro-acoustic and post-produced jams meets chanson française expérimentale.

“French Exit”, is a nod to a long and softer version of Gluantes Pornographies (from Plaisirs Américains). The primitive approach of the electric bass playing (by Femminielli) and the minimalist drums (D.Vanchesteing) sprinkled with piano and synthesizer ( Asaël Robitaille & Jackson MacIntosh) create a musical trance, representing the dissociative disorders of our protagonist's personality. The showman plunges the listener into a closed-door environment where he frenetically hurls his disgust at everything and everyone-- spitting in your face as you draw your last breath. A bankrupt restaurant with employees who’ve betrayed him, ghosts of investors and political conspiracies past haunt this old clown alone in his ruined restaurant. He continues to entertain the last curious leeches who only want to see him hit rock bottom. And his ever-present Johnny, who watches him curiously, all the while participating in his pathetic antics. His wife looks on with sadness because she's still in the “real world” of financial devastation caused by a restaurant slowly tanking. This love triangle between her, him and Johnny was originally a joke, but now it's become an ordeal for all involved. The track ends in a waltz with the showman: He dances with death, with his employees, his wife and his clown alterego: Johnny. A one-on-one in a drunken boat. He's looking for lost love in the bottom of his soiled, jacket pocket. He has to accept himself as he is.

“L’Amour avec Moi” is sociability in the discothèque. A swingers club. An early night disco song to eloquently introduce himself. It's a song dedicated to his wife; the only one who’s truly supported him from the beginning and together, have lived through life's ups and downs. They meet, and fall in love again in a swinger's club. In Bernardino Femminielli's music, the listener can understand that there is always an extreme seriousness, grandiloquent, theatrical energy. So much so that there is obviously an irony, a forced, uncynical echoed laugh. The things he tells are intimate, autobiographical, and evoke an expression of great pain. The provocation he offers, is to laugh and to breathe easy in the gravity of such heavy moments. His intent is to assert irony and satire, and that is serious. The description of the toilet gives way to a very raw, erotic metaphor of the stages of a sexual act. The text evokes sentimental life, philosophical reflections, and how to apply them to all aspects of life— while quickly moving on to sexual pleasure in explicit words, sexual descriptive paroxysm, pornographic climax: Erection, penetration, wet pussy, the pleasure of coitus. But is all this act in his head? Fabulations? Is it really mutual love? Does his wife really exist? Or is it more of an inserted pretext for the listener to sympathize with the tortured character (Let's imagine instead that the showman is just jerking off in a booth to a pornographic film.)

Falling next into “L'Exil”, the theme of the album, a 16 minute expressionist, invasive and alienating malaise of a track. The artist and producer duo Femminielli/Vanchesteing are in it for laughs. Their own “Davis/Macero effect”, a "Get Up With / Big Fun", but glaucous, doomed from the beginning, where instead, human warmth is transformed into carrion under the hot summer sun. Too cowardly to take his own life, the showman celebrates the death of himself through the exploitation and sacrifice of others. His fixations are material possessions and authority (the order) and how to pervert the two into a degrading spectacle. “L’Exil” ends with a cover of “Daddy's Boy”, a track released as a video by Femminielli in 2018— a mise en abyme of a forgotten song that never really saw the light of day.

Bernardino Femminielli likes contrasts: especially the strained coupling of self-gratification and self-loathing. From parody to dead serious, track 3 is an abstract reread of the wandering he experienced during his four years of extensive touring. As an observer, there are reflections of a moral and ethical nature that are aligned to him. When he writes or composes, or even when he performs, he is thinking about prejudice, hatred and persecution— and how unjust they are. There is sadness and tears in “L’Exil”, but also humour and determination. Femminielli was born with parents who were persecuted during war. It is in the blood of this distress, decades later, where one seeks one's own danger to provoke and to confront head on. Perhaps this conflict is attributable for this insatiability that lies deep within him?

The final track, “The Ballad of Daddy & Johnny”, co-written with D.Vanchesteing, is an obvious testimony: the melancholy pop lullaby. It's "La ballade de Johnny Jane" (Gainsbourg)but less cheesy and more morbid. Metaphorically, it’s a doll from the 19th century, giggling and looking you straight in the eyes. Musically, it’s a Giallo À La Femminielli. There is no blood, no blade penetration--just a swift graze of the jugular. The bittersweet memories, the American pleasures, and the quest for a dream have become his own undoing-- the mask has finally fallen off. The entertainer can finally emerge on the other side with his double and swallow the pill.