Jac Berrocal

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 Deshays, plus many musicians from the French underground collective scene of the 1970s. Not content with manhandling a toy piano on "Tango" (which features mind-blowing accordion from Parle), abusing an arsenal of instruments including saw blades, pistols, shower attachment and even gingerbread, Berrocal pushes his own voice way over the edge on "Incontrolablslaooo" and "Faits Divers," moving from a 60-a-day smoker's cough to a terrifying sequence of gargles and vomits.

The grungy free rock of "No More Dirty Bla Blaps," the Portsmouth Sinfonia-like spoof Dixieland of "Rideau," the distressing punk of "Signe Particulier" and all manner of field recordings and cut-ups in Berrocal's Artaudian theater style, combining the excesses of glam and punk cold-wave with a post-1968 Situationist perspective. With the same creative attitude documented through the mythic d'Avantage label (1976-1979), Berrocal later accumulated an extensive archive of unreleased recordings, some of which finally surface now on this new edition. Catalogue represents the most experimental and complex of Berrocal's records, as historical as contemporary modern, classic, and at the same time as fresh and strange as if it had been recorded last week.

During the same year Steven Stapleton frequently travelled to Paris to meet Jacques Berrocal to discuss a possible collaboration. In 1980, Berrocal travelled to London with his pocket trumpet and Tibetan oboe and recorded with Stapleton, Heman Patak and John Fothergill on NWW's second album, but that's another story.