Le Grand Sbam - "Janus": a Cthulhu Opera About Reconnecting With the Living World
On June 19th, the Lyon-based collective Le Grand Sbam released Janus on the Dur et Doux label. Eighteen tracks, 23 musician-performers, nearly fifty minutes of music: this isn't a record you put on in the background. It's a journey.
Composed by Antoine Arnera and co-written with his brother, sociologist Thomas Arnera, Janus is billed as a "Cthulhu opera" that's philo-zoophic, zoopunk, and ecofeminist all at once. The project pays tribute to three very different figures: scientist Jean-Pierre Petit, biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway, and Matshish Kapéu, a spiritual figure of the Innu people. The connecting thread, as strange as it sounds, is about relearning our connection to the living world, through compost, fossils, and even our own flatulence.
Musically, Le Grand Sbam keeps digging into that singular space between early music, punk energy, and orchestral scale: violins, bass clarinet, bassoon, harp, cimbalom, layered vocals, and a very present electric section. The title isn't picked at random either, Janus is the two-faced Roman god of thresholds and transitions, which sums up the band's approach rather well: holding chaos and rigor, primal trance and academic writing, in the same hand.
The result is a dense, unruly record full of unhinged interludes and tracks that shift shape mid-stream, exactly the kind of thing that refuses to fit any category, and exactly the kind of thing no algorithm would ever put in front of you.
Listen: Janus, out since June 19, 2026 on Bandcamp.
Le Grand Sbam is featured on our Alt playlist.
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