Etienne O'Leary

Awesome and obscure musician/film director, Étienne O’Leary made essentially three experimental films completed in Paris between 1966 and 1968. Day Tripper, Homeo (aka Homeo: Minor Death: Coming Back from Going Home) and Chromo Sud constitute a cinema of resistance. These brutally personal and subversive films form a body of work with few precedents. O’Leary’s contribution to French underground cinema is not, however, limited to the introduction of a new cinematographic language. The potency of his oeuvre resides in three unsettlingly evocative soundtracks composed by the director himself. This music is now available on vinyl for the very first time, in a lavishly packaged 180 gr LP in 300 copies only

“O’Leary was a Canadian phonic plunderer some years before John Oswald raised the practice to a fine art. On ‘Day Tripper,’ sounds of a piano interior are intercut with a collage of time-locked samples from records of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Dionne Warwick, The Who and Nancy Sinatra. Harmonium looms large on the other two tracks, reedily droning and fluttering away, outside of any recognizable musical genre. It follows O’Leary’s impulse, embellished sporadically with quivering electronics, percussive ringing, distorted and slowed down speech. The resulting music is unique and precarious. This is the etch sound of a particular historical moment, when received expectations and constraints were dissolving — a time of new and unpredictable singularities.” (Julian Cowley, The Wire)

eye-opening issue of film-maker étienne o’leary’s raw, cut-up, often plunderphonic tape-music scores to his seminal 60’s experimental shorts ...
... if you dug the arthur lipsett “soundtracks” lp, raymond dijkstra’s barrel-organ wheeze or badouin oosterlynck’s prepared piano & slown-down sound-poetry ... or even if you’re just a regular ‘ol fan of raw, arbitrary tape-collage music, this is pretty much the bee’s knees ; highly recommended !!! (Mimaroglu)