Buy vinyl: editionsappaerent.bandcamp.com/album/lexil

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, 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 dissociative identity 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.