2025 Stock. 300 copies. Jac Berrocal and David Fenech have been recording together for over a decade, a partnership that has produced albums with Ghédalia Tazartès (RIP) and Vincent Epplay, and led to performances alongside Felix Kubin, Jean-Hervé Peron, Jean Noel Cognard, and Thierry Müller (Illitch). Their work together occupies a distinct zone in French experimental music—playful without being frivolous, structured without being rigid, drawing equally from free jazz, musique concrète, and the absurdist tradition of Tazartès himself.
For Xmas In March, they are joined by American improviser Jason Willett, best known for his work with Half Japanese. The trio convened for a recording session in Paris that yielded seven tracks—what the musicians describe as "peppermint-striped favorites," though the album operates at some distance from conventional holiday music. These are pieces built around the idea of Christmas rather than its commercial manifestation: the anticipation, the strange temporal dislocation of ritual, the way nostalgia and present moment collide.
Berrocal's trumpet work here achieves a smoothness not heard since his 1983 album Hôtel Hôtel—his sound like a sleigh in a jet stream, to use the album's own description. The metaphor is apt: there's a sense of glide and propulsion, of movement through space without friction. Berrocal has spent decades investigating what the trumpet can do outside jazz convention, and these tracks find him working with melodic fragments that suggest rather than state, that hover in the mix like half-remembered tunes.
Willett's contribution is equally unconventional. He plays bass with a rubber band, generating an impossibly huge sound from a miniature instrument—like Charlie Haden played from a matchbox. The resonance he achieves defies the physical limitations of the setup, creating low-end frequencies that anchor the music while maintaining an element of absurdity. He also plays a rare wooden synthesizer called Cocoquantus, adding timbral colors that sit somewhere between acoustic and electronic, between organic and processed. Fenech handles electric guitar, turntables, and vocals, while also serving as recording engineer and mixer. His approach to all these roles emphasizes texture and space—the guitar often functions as atmospheric wash rather than melodic lead, the turntables provide rhythmic punctuation and timbral disruption, and his vocals operate more as another instrumental color than as lyrical narrative. The production maintains clarity while embracing the rough edges and happy accidents that define the session aesthetic.
The tracks unfold like smoldering embers—moments of heat and light emerging from sustained low-intensity burn. There's excitement here, and anticipation, but filtered through a European avant-garde sensibility that values obliqueness over direct statement. The closing track features Vincent Epplay as special guest, bringing the extended circle of collaborators into the frame.
Xmas In March exists in the tradition of experimental music that takes vernacular forms—in this case, holiday music—and investigates what happens when you strip away expectation and convention. What remains are the emotional and structural foundations: cycles, rituals, the comfort and strangeness of repeated annual events. This is the album you'll want under the tree skirt, assuming your tree skirt can accommodate free improvisation, brass experimentalism, and homemade bass instruments. Edition of 300, cut by Andreas "Lupo" Lubich. Joyeux Noël.
