Clearlight

A long overdue gathering. For more than half a century, Cyrille Verdeaux's Clearlight project has occupied one of the strangest and most overlooked positions in the landscape of 1970s European progressive music - a French ensemble whose foundational works were recorded in England, issued by Virgin, and shaped, in no small part, by the orbit of Gong. Now, for the first time, Esoteric collects the five essential Clearlight albums into a single remastered 5CD clamshell box, with a new booklet essay setting the record where it belongs.

The story begins in 1973, when Verdeaux, a classically trained pianist who had studied at the conservatories of Paris and Nice, sent a demo of two long piano solos to Richard Branson's still fledgling Virgin Records. The label was riding the impossible success of Tubular Bells, and Verdeaux's symphonic conception, two side-long movements built up by overdub, was an obvious heir to the formula. Clearlight Symphony, recorded across 1973 and 1974 between The Manor and David Vorhaus's Kaleidophon Studios, finally appeared in early 1975. It was the first French progressive rock album to be issued by a major British label, and it remains the document of an extraordinary collision: Verdeaux's chordal, almost ritual piano writing layered with the cosmic VCS3 of Tim Blake, the patient harmonic guitar of Steve Hillage, and Didier Malherbe's tenor saxophone, the Gong contingent threaded through Mellotron and gong washes that retain, fifty years on, the slow gravity of an unfolding rite.

Forever Blowing Bubbles, recorded in the summer of 1975 and presented here with five bonus tracks, including the rare 'Sweet Absinthe' and a Mellotron mix of 'Without Words', moves the project decisively toward full band form. The lineup gathers François Jeanneau on saxophones and flutes, Joël Dugrenot on bass and vocals, and former King Crimson violinist David Cross among the guests, the writing opening into something more porous, song-shaped, jazz-inflected, marked by an unmistakable Mediterranean lightness.

By 1977's Les Contes du Singe Fou, originally issued on the short-lived Isadora label, the Clearlight palette has widened again. Former Magma violinist Didier Lockwood joins as a soloist of fearsome agility, and the album threads jazz fusion, psychedelia, and the proto-new age textures that had begun to surface in adjacent corners of the European scene. Visions (1978), the project's final 1970s statement, presented here with seven bonus tracks, leans further still toward Indian classical influence, Patrick Depaumanou's sitar and Mohamed Taha's tabla setting Lockwood's incandescent violin against ARP Odyssey drift and Verdeaux's piano cadences. It is one of the period's quiet bridges between European progressive rock and what would, a few years later, be called fourth world music.

The set closes with 2014's Impressionist Symphony, a reunion record in which Hillage, Malherbe, and Blake return to the fold for an album of pieces titled in homage to Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Degas, and the rest. It reads, in retrospect, as a confirmation, the same compositional voice still recognisable across four decades, still drawn to the long form, the layered keyboard, the patient unfurling.

What emerges across these five discs is a body of work that refuses easy classification. Symphonic rock, space rock, jazz fusion, raga, the early shimmer of new age - Clearlight passes through all of them without ever quite settling, an itinerant project whose centre of gravity is always Verdeaux's piano and the slow architectural patience of his writing. Newly remastered, generously annotated, this is the first time the full arc has been available in one place. A missing piece in the puzzle of 1970s European progressive music, finally restored to view.

Issued by Esoteric as a 5CD clamshell box with booklet and new essay.