Ilitch

This is an unreleased album from 1975 of studio/live material! Dieu has smiled upon us, for a previously shelved early album (1975) by Ilitch finally has its jour in the soleil. Thierry Müller's strange musical arc is further enriched and confounded by this exploratory cosmic release. A brilliant mix of Krauty space groans and experimentalism (see also Conrad Schnitzler and Ash Ra Temple, etc) and the progressive electronics of Igor Wakhevitch. There is some psych in the folds, and the album is tripped-out all over. Full of small sounds underneath mystical and shimmering beds of loping electronic waves. It sounds like it was made three galaxies over (isn't that where France is?). 6 tracks of deep galactics (or is it a journey through another planet's Hell?). One person's Enfer is another's Ciel.

Like other 1970s European electronic rock artists from Heldon to Conrad Schnitzer, Ilitch owes more to the avant-garde experiments of Stockhausen and Xenakis than to the rock and roll of Chuck Berry or even the Beatles… Ilitch came out of France, was the work of mostly one person, Thierry Müller, using unconventional guitars as well as keyboards and other electronics to create strange textures and sounds. Müller was a photographer and graphic artist from Paris who started making recordings in the early 1970s using prepared guitars, harmonium, and even using the tape recorder as another instrument. Initially he worked completely solo but by late 1975 he was being helped by Ruth Ellyeri. In 1976 his brother Patrick Müller on EMS synthisizer and treated guitar joined Ilitch, for a live performance at the Café La Manille, in Paris, and the duo also played there the following two years as well. In October and November of that year, Ilitch recorded the material for the LP "Periodikmindtrouble", but by the time the LP was released, in 1978, the original second side was scrapped for other more recent material.