condition (record/cover): NM / NM - Jean-Claude Roché occupies unique territory: not composer but recordist, not creator but witness, the microphone his instrument, the world's birds his orchestra. Oiseaux de Madagascar on L'Oiseau Musicien documents avian species found nowhere else on earth, songs that evolved in isolation over millions of years.

Roché's work influenced composers from Olivier Messiaen, who transcribed birdsong into piano notation, to François Bayle, whose dreamed birds owe something to these documented ones. The field recording tradition that Roché exemplified would eventually feed into ambient music, sound art, acoustic ecology, disciplines that barely existed when he first pointed microphones at trees.

L'Oiseau Musicien, "The Musician Bird," names both label and subject. The imprint specialized in Roché's work, building a catalog of ornithological documents that scientists and artists consulted equally. The Madagascar LP preserves sounds that deforestation threatens with extinction: music that may outlast its performers, archives of species we're busy erasing.