Risk & vision from an illustrious pioneer of both composed & improvised/free excursion, along with much in-between. Side A exacts with Sir Simpleton! From the first cycle of the killer opening bass line, a sly, finagling creeper in ten (plucked simultaneously by two bassists), you know the subsequent events are going to be special. The track is swiftly festooned with an accompanying multitude of reeds, vocals & the third bass component (playing a separate pattern that embellishes the core composition maintained by the two initial bassists). Extensive soling & improvised theatrics effuse from two of the reed players & Myers whilst the remaining musicians conserve the structured chassis. It’s a brilliant song, crammed with unusual styling & methodology, excellent performance, imaginative & unorthodox instrument assignment (four bassists, four reed musicians & one vocalist) & a gloriously fatal bass-lick to spill your splanchnic but good, & this incredibly heteroclite deportment & allocation thrives for the albums duration.

Last on side A is Celebration. This is a slow, sweet & amiable Bluesy Folk song (at least that’s the appearance I perceive). It’s the least challenging, most conventional & coherent song on the album albeit with the abstruse instrumentation of the assemble. The song is quite sentimental or at least on the verge of such sentimentality. Nothin’ wrong with that, but talking from a strictly personal angle this track does not engage me & rarely gets a rotation.

Third of four is Air Song with all basses barred & all four reed players on flutes. This track is the most abstract & least direct, an oblique exploration that resides within the “Flot” (pensive, discombobulated, inconclusive, curious & amorphous type’ shit) margin. For me it works because there is quite a lot of content & a rich array of sounds & approach, something this intensely non-specific & vague style frequently lacks. I don’t get stultified or start shouting at the record player (mf git’ on wit it!) as much of this music impels me to do. it’s not linear, the versatility is copious & despite the somewhat subdued suggestion the musicians exert themselves (in fact the song ends on a crescendo of heightened agitation & kinetics that are developed in the last third). Impressive indeed.

Lastly, the wig-splitter, the cherry on top of the lamp-post, it’s the sublime Fe Fi Fo Fum! Cripes! I lud’ dis shit! Lets’ compartmentalize this complex mother…. Gorgeous walking bass strutting with amped-vamp throughout (who dat?), a knock out solo from Threadgill, marvellous but fairly standard ground. But it’s not long before the rest of the troop start to pile into the overcrowded vessel & rock the foundations with less & less rational playing & escalating histrionics shedding lucidity by the pale by the minute. It get’s more & more out of hand, but the lone lucid bassist just keeps on walking amongst the gathering maelstrom. Superb!

What a great album. Utterly disparate & individual!

Rekd: 1979

Label: Arista/Novus

Brigitte Fontaine was a mesmeric mandarin in early 70’s European Avant-Garde (with a delectable French vivant), transmogrifying a massive pastiche of genres, themes & instrumentations. I don’t know too much about her background, but it seems her professional radix originates from the theatrics of French Jazz crooning of the 50’s/60’s, ball-rooms, bobs, oil-spill mascara, bohemian mischief n’ the like (sorry, it’s not an era or genre I am knowledgeable on). The earliest material I have of her is a 1967 collaboration LP with Jacques Higelin (whom Brigitte worked with frequently) & is generally more straight, albeit clearly very thespian, hyper blithesome & keen to frolic in boundary contesting terrain with blatant Avant leanings & appetite. Anyway, she went on to do lots of really exquisite, weird, supra-diverse, challenging & adventurous recordings in the early 70’s, all brilliant & firmly in the allo-Avant expanse. For me though, having wallowed in the lot for some time now, I have no qualms with nominating my favourite from her as this s/t LP from 1972, for me not just her best but also her most outré & eccentric of the lot.
This is a particularly wonderful record. French Avant-Garde from the sixties sung by a sultry brunette is going to struggle to fall flat, but this LP really scales to the loftiest echelon, not just for it’s superb content & remarkable versatility but the perfect crafting/mixing of the LP that has such a conclusive & satisfactory entirety, unfurling like the perfect diagesis from sequence to sequence.

Unfortunately my French is terrible, so I understand very little of the lyrics in this beautiful language. No matter, as it’s totally transfixing & beguiling, but from what I can gather love, sex, revolution & socio-political subjects provide the bulk of sentiment & lyrical content. Brigitte sings beautifully, not at all in one style, harnessing operatic, choir, nursery rhyme, spoken word, screaming, crying & many more mediums & modals.

Organ, Synthesizer, hand drums, brass & reeds, cello, guitar & additional male & female vocals accompany. Like the moods & melange of styles, the miscellany of musicians & instrumentation constantly changes, occasionally deserting entirely with nothing but Fontaine’s bare voice performing solitarily. A lot of the arrangements seem very conceptual, perhaps trying to encapsulate the songs theme? (I don’t know of the composition process). Many of the tracks also have very cool micro epilogues embedded, garnishing a baroque twist to the closing sequence with cinematic evocations. I really love this stuff, it’s just so polymerous & unpredictable & manages to edge it’s way into the most surreal situations etched in pure emotive oddity.

I won’t break down the entire track codex, & they work exceptionally well when played as one piece (or two, side’s A & B), I’m sure considerable craft & deliberation has gone into the ergonomic-enjoining, but for me some individual songs need highlighting. On side-A, “L’Auberge” a rueful, elegiac, choiresque, ecclesial spoof that despite it’s beauty has bizarreness that belongs in the house of freaks. It’s two cello’s (or cello & violin) plus organ along with Brigitte’s mournful, supressed-pomp basilica. “Vingt Secondes” a distinctly peculiar twenty second flute & duel female vocal codicil that closes Side-A also needs notation.
Side-B’s incepting piece Eros is a intense, dark & beautiful ballad accompanied only by intermittent & minimal acoustic guitar. The following track “Une Minute Cinquante-Cinq” that has Fontaine & fellow vocalist Julie Dassin singing rousingly over another recording of Fontaine weeping is also really quite amazing & both beautiful & unsettling.

Really, we have one seriously fulgurating LP here, & personally for me the best & most abstruse from Fontaine’s incredible 70’s output. There’s so much coalescing, so many strange & novel ideas, detail & methods all swaddled in this irresistible Avant-Garde premium. Really glorious stuff.

Fantastically, this album is still in print along with pretty much all of Brigitte’s early stuff which is all worth picking up.

Label: Saravah

Rekd: 1972

Woo boy! Another seminal secretion of mercurial IDM cross-breeding & first class Electronic gallimaufry & permutation. After one of the most atrocious nadirs of egregious postal misconduct, in which ample Low-Res packages stuffed with the finest waxology were erroneously returned to sender, back & forth over the Atlantic at great expense, dejection & exasperation to both parties EVEN THOUGH THE FUCKING ADDRESS WAS CORRECT & TOTALLY LEGIBLE, obstinate obsessions & irrepressible tenacities found a substitute route & Release The Sharks finally made it to my operating table. It’s been over a decade since the profound, irresistible beat-driven electronic exuberance of the previous four track Your Bad Luck LP in all it’s miscellaneous glory crashed into my sound spectrum & hooked it’s pixelated quills into my brain nexus indelibly. I was both excited & concerned as to whether this new LP would parallel with it’s predecessor, certainly no easy objective. Personally, I can confirm RTS as a veritable knock-out in pretty much every sense. With a richly varied dynamic of trenchant IDM, Dub Step, Brekcore, Speedcore, hard-Techno, Industrial Hip Hop & heaps of insane bass/synth/electronic-modulations veering in many directions, coexisting, discommoding & splicing, Adjust once again assembles a detailed & unpredictable network of vigorous master class & hard slammers & digital-disjunction. The conspicuous novelty of frequently using more extreme digital materials such as Breakcore, Glitch, Speedcore & yet with the inclusion of such abrasive & kinetic forms Adjust seems in no eagerness to compete or qualify for any accredited status or conclusion as an “extreme” purveyor & is content to wield these mediums almost sparingly, purely to the productivity & enhancement of the music at hand. The composition, production & phonetics are all of considerable expertise! Really good shit from front to back, let’s hope it’s not going to take another effin’ decade before the next screening with this excellent project materializes (it will however be worth the wait either way).

Label: Low Res

Rekd: 2010