LA BREICHE (“the witch”) features two well-known musicians: Arexis and Lafforgue of Stille Volk – a band best known since 1994 as one of the pioneers of Pagan Folk in Europe – and of Pagan Black French band Sus Scrofa. “Le Mal Des Ardents” (“Holy Fire”) is a concept album about fears, terrors, about the balance between folklore and reason, myth and common sense, light and darkness, past and present, modernity and archaism. The album marries minimalism, purity, a fine approach and ancient instruments: traditional music (hurdy gurdy, shawm, polyphonies, percussion, gongs); the gloom of oppressive dark ambient; the slow pace of ritual music, wavering between modernity and archaism. Voices rise towards beauty, lifting it away from some occult mud. Holy Fire takes us back to a forgotten world – a primal, ancient, wild and free world, pervaded by secret dances of sorcerers’, unfathomable forests, remote and lifeless places.