Music from France

2005 release ** Released in 1979 in a limited edition on his own d'Avantage label, Catalogue, with its overt theatricality is every bit as wild as the previous Paralleles. Not really jazz, not rock, having nothing to do with contemporary music either, Catalogue is a kind of sonic postcard which features not the group of the same name but instead numerous Jacques Berrocal associates including Potage (co-founder of the d'Avantage label in 1976), Parle, Ferlet, Pauvros and recording engineer Daniel…

long out print item by Jac Berrocal, a 10” picture-disc, text by Antonin Artaud spoken by Berrocal himself, including excerpts from 'Voyage au bord de la ville' a very abstract and dissonant track with music by Berrocal, Gilbert Artman and Jack Belsen. Private edition of 250 copies only.

Violin and piano works by Ravel (Sonate posthume), Franck (Sonata in A major), Ligeti (Duo, first recording) and Messiaen (Thème et variations), played by Natascia and Raffaella Gazzana; recorded March 2017 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano.

Japanese pianist Momo Kodama plays Ravel's Miroirs, Takemitsu's Rain Tree Sketch (1982) and Messiaen's La fauvette des jardins (1970), recorded in September 2012 at the Historischer Reitstadel, Neumarkt.

Either available separately as a 3" CD, or as a bonus disk within the new Tazartes boxset. "Les Danseurs de la Pluie", which gives title to the complete anthology, is a 12-minute mini-CD, presented on creative disc, including four previously unavailable tracks. Two 1977 killer recordings from the 'Eclipse Totale' sessions of a very wild and residential nature; and two colossal new pieces recorded in 2005.

At last! This is the first new Ghédalia Tazartès record in 10 years! Not that this gentleman was done with his Impromuzic, but he prefers to watch his widowed canary flying & singing in his flatelier than to release records. Anyway, he's back with these memorable & noisy performances of Rimbaud & Verlaine, giving to their poetry the best of tributes.

Recreating the idioms of some ethnic musics, Ghédalia Tazartès invents himself an imaginary world which seems to be inspired by differents forgotten traditions. Musician, genious handyman, singer to the improbable accents, Ghédalia Tazartès pours a flood of sounds and atmospheres, voices and strange melodies, weaving the screen of an hallucinatory soundtrack which accounts for the universe of the show 'Jeanne' (Co Pardès rimonim) for which it carried out the majority of those compositions…

This recording is taken from a live concert which took place at the Musique Action Festival in France on Thursday the 26 of May 2005. Initially Luc Ferrari and erikm were invited to present "Les Protorythmiques" at Musique Action 2005, a work composed around a new 'open working process' in which sounds and compositional parts could be substituted and transformed in an almost improvisational setting, this however was not to pass due to Luc Ferrari's health, at which point Thomas Lehn was invited …

One of the landmarks of minimalism, Radigue's sonic investigation into life, death, and life elsewhere after death, considered to be Eliane Radigue's masterpiece. "Trilogie de la Mort is a work in three parts. The first, Kyema, was originally released by XI in 1992. The 2nd and 3rd parts, Kailasha and Koumé are being released for the first time and the trilogy now makes its debut as a whole [this 3CD set is being sold for the cost of 2 CDs to make up for the prior availability Kyema]. 'Kyema' is…

Beautiful extended ambient work from Eliane Radigue, a composer known for her work with magnetic tape and Arp Synthesizer, and who studied under Pierre Schaeefer and Pierre Henry in the late 50's. Her compositions are often drone-like, impeccably crafted electronic sounds which seem to move in a continual flow around the listener. She has created many meditative works since the late 1970s, mostly based on Tibetan Buddhist subject matter.Jetsun Mila is inspired by the life of Milarepa, a great yo…

Five pieces in tribute to Milarepa, the eleventh century Tibetan poet and saint. Radigue on synthesizer, Robert Ashley reading in English and Lama Kunga Rinpoche in Tibetan, the last track running sixty-two minutes.

In an allusion to Michel Chion’s ‘Dix études de musique concrète’, this collection of acousmatic moments represents a meditative opportunity for Denis Dufour. Sorting through his repertoire, it aims to seek out and identify characteristics and easily recognizable expressive habits whose clarity brings them close to the art of melody in an approach borne of entomological specimen classification and playful staging at the same time. Neither text nor theatrical contexts. Twelve short pieces; melodi…

In Bocalises, Denis Dufour explored with virtuosity the sound possibilities of a sole sound source, glass jars broken, crushed and mixed to themselves to infinity. Fifteen years later, he takes up the material and, with digital tools, presents a retouched and recoloured version to give a new power and poetic richness to the initial energy.

This obscure group of radical experimental noise makers used improvisation and collage to craft strange sounds and deconstructed songs for highly creative music that is as far off the path of conventions as that of similar but more known visionaries like the Residents and Nurse With Wound. In fact, DDAA roughly began the same time as NWW in the late '70s, started by three visual artists, Sylvie Martineau, Jean-Philippe Fee, and Jean-Luc Andre in Lion sur Mer, France. The multi-talented trio orig…