A secret society of diligent practitioners of the cabalistic part of pop music for an eternity, Dorian Pimpernel only seems to be working with one goal in mind: restart the Machine that once made us dream and go into ecstasy. Formed in the mid-2000s, it's a gathering of odd-balls only: one discreet drummer who claims to be "captivated by Ancient Greece"; a songwriter who's also a philosophy scholar and the author of a book on the aesthetics of the Minimalists; an actor - director - assistant-director - composer of film music; an actor-bass player and record collector who you would be advised not to try and silence once he's begun to list favorite artists; and eventually a guitar-player who played his guitar for a very long time locked up in his room "without thinking he would one day have the guts to leave." Far from the old habits of your ol' band of mates who migrate from the living-room to the practice room after a nice chat over a handful of favorite records, Dorian Pimpernel gathered around a general disinterest for sports and a strange concept of pop: "moonshine pop," i.e. the esoteric, whimsical, volatile, evil little sister of the famous "sunshine pop" of California. Founder of this aesthetic movement at a time when he was sole member of the Dorian Pimpernel Club, Johan Girard explains: "At the time, in the mid-2000s, I had this habit of listening to records of sunshine pop on repeat. And I had this idea of taking the notion backwards, attempt a sketch of its underside, but without distance, easy postmodern irony, or cheap revivalism." After a first attempt at an album for a label at the other end of the world (Hollandia, released on the Japanese label Rallye in 2006), Allombon creates an actual world for us to live in, and wishes us to sink so deep into it that only our dreams and nightmares shall be deep enough to accommodate its creatures, chants, and architectural works. Similar to the half-magic, half-literary, half-alchemical treatises, half-tomes of poetry of the Renaissance, Allombon creates a complex and coherent world. If our five freaks are practitioners of a dark secret doctrine, they are first and foremost believers of the power of the great pop melody. And if their art is esoteric in any way, it is in that of Alice in Wonderland, using gentleness and vivid colors. Inspired first and foremost by the first wave of scholar psychedelia (Sgt. Peppers, SF Sorrow, An Electric Storm by White Noise, The United States of America by The United States Of America), then by the second wave in the '70s (Kevin Ayers and Kraftwerk) as well as library and film of the golden age era (Morricone, Basil Kirchin), and by thousands of haunted instruments (rare or very rare synths, old guitars). Dorian Pimpernel have only one stated goal: give rise to tornadoes to carry us someplace else.