An aural bridge, offering rare connections between underground music and unconventional notions of the avant-garde, Pascal Comelade’s Sentimientos is a singular journey that has almost no equivalent anywhere in the history of late 20th c. music. Incredibly seductive and listenable, while never failing to levy quiet challenges at every turn.

Among the most fascinating avenues of exploration within the history of music, are artists and objects that sidestep standard notions of genre, category, and idiom, forging their own singular path. More often than not, few are willing to approach and attempt to understand these outliers in their own moment, and on their own terms, relegating them to obscurity and the shadows of time. This is the wonderful realm that Superior Viaduct’s sub-imprint, États-Unis, has chosen to dive and explore, bringing us incredible, limited edition reissues of LPs by Tod Dockstader, Die Tödliche Doris, Le Forte Four, Joe Jones, Remko Scha, John Duncan, Annea Lockwood, Terry Fox, and others, since its launch in 2017, and in so doing taking great strides to rebalancing our vision of adventurous music during the second half of the 20th century. Now their gaze falls on the visionary work of Pascal Comelade, with a beautiful reissue of his incredibly rare 1982 album, Sentimientos. As important and thrilling as reissues come, it’s impossible to express how excited we are to have it in our hands.

First emerging in France during the mid 1970s under the moniker Fluence - whose lone self-titled LP is also receiving the reissue treatment by États-Unis - Pascal Comelade is a true creative outsider and visionary mind who has quietly occupied the musical underground for almost 5 decades, issuing countless challenges and changing the face of music as he went. While his earliest efforts fell somewhere between the realms of Prog and explicitly avant-garde / experimental electronic music, as the dawn of the 1980s grew closer he increasingly veered toward the DIY spirit of Punk, creating a subtle, intricate, and abrasive body of work which would lay groundwork for the coming movement of industrial music, and bedroom electronics, all of which eventually led to remarkable collaborations with everyone from Robert Wyatt and Faust, to David Cunningham, Jac Berrocal, Pierre Bastien and P.J. Harvey.

Sentimientos is one of the great artifacts from the early phase of Comelade’s incredible career, released on LP by the tiny, but seminal imprint, Dys, run by William Sharp, and has remained, until now, one of the most elusive and sought after LPs in the French composer's vast catalogue. Recorded on a two-track Revox machine, the album is an interwoven series of poetic and imaginative, incidental works - only two of the twenty tracks pass the four minute mark - that traverse a striking range of creative territory. Earthbound and organic, melodic fragments of piano, organ, plastic saxophone, vibes, guitar, toy piano, ukulele and synthesizer stitch a patchwork vision of Comelade's boundless creative spirit that traverses bedroomy pop, rethought Erik Satie and Brian Eno - bringing out remarkable depths of the compositions, and meandering instrumental passages that border on ambient and new age, imbued with darker tones of the industrial world.

It’s an album of anarchic energy that radiates mystery, while being unapologetically whimsical.