condition (record/cover): EX- (occasional surface noise) / VG+ light ring wear on front and general wear)

Gatefold sleeve.

The opening seconds of Parallèles are a small private revolution. A piano figure stumbles, a trumpet bleats, and then Vince Taylor (yes: the British rock'n'roll cult figure, the model for Bowie's Ziggy Stardust) begins muttering through "Rock'n Roll Station" while Jac Berrocal sketches a pocket-trumpet melody over Roger Ferlet's metallic percussion. The song would, decades later, surface in films, in Nurse With Wound mixtapes, in dub remixes. None of those would match the version captured here in 1976 by a French trumpeter who had decided that free jazz, glam rock, Artaud-derived theatre and Tibetan ritual could share one record.

Berrocal, born in Saint-Jean-d'Angély in 1946, founded the d'Avantage label specifically to release this album and its successors. Parallèles is uncategorisable by design: the title piece runs over eighteen minutes and braids vocal incantation, free percussion, prepared trumpet, electronics and an austere theatre of small noises into a single unbroken structure. The shorter pieces (the wired-jaw blues of "Rock'n Roll Station", the abrasive "Bric Et De Broc") establish the catalog of gestures that Steven Stapleton would later cite as a template for Nurse With Wound's earliest work.

This is the original vintage d'Avantage pressing, dav 01: the first release on a label that would issue only a handful of records (1976-1980) before disappearing, and the document that effectively launched a particular strain of French post-1968 underground music. Wired, unhinged, and entirely its own thing.