Editions Gravats Vinyl, CD & Tape 5 Items

More abstract cinematique than the roiling rhythms gathered on the first instalment, this next volume breaks down between passages of atmospheric filmic dialogue and feral no-wave industrial that cuts layers deeper into Geins’t Naït’s uncompromising oeuvre. Vacillating between chilling vignettes and rowdy churn, it portrays more disturbed and oblique aspects of an artist whose 30-odd years of work links the most errant ends of french industrial musick to soundtracks for Wim Wenders, to collaborations with Scanner - with a big fan in Vladimir Ivkovic, whose Offen Music also issued a key retrospective ‘Make Dogs Sing’ in 2019. ‘Archives 2-3’ is defined by its restless variegation and asymmetric juxtapositions. The set veers from short form shots of film-like cues such as the excellent ‘Georgette’ answer machine ruckus and the cold, ceramic ambience, or the shattered rhythms of his ‘Casse’ parts, to proper ruthless gobs of industrial gristle in the likes of ‘J’Ai Apprise Hier’ and more full bodied works to get your teeth into. We’re talking a queasy fever dream scene in ‘Inkel’, and the GRM-on-a-budget soundscaping of ‘Jévus’, thru to crazed pieces resembling cyberpunk soundtracks in what could be the German- language dubbing of Tetsuo Iron Man on ‘Hans’, and, for the crankiest nuts, a sweltering nine minutes of atonal clang and motorik drive like Vivid Oblivion jamming with a Japanese noise beast on ‘Chiken Kitchen’.

Opéra Mort - collaborators of the late, great Ghédalia Tazartès in Reines D’Angleterre - float their first new suite of roving, hallucinatory electro-acoustic works in 4 years on a return to Brittany’s Editions Gravats label.

Èlg & Jo Tanz’s hard-to-classify project Opéra Mort has been in operation since early moves on Jo Tanz’s tanzprocess label paved the way for a 2010 split release with the legendary Smegma, a cult pair of Reines D’Angleterre sides with august outsider Ghédalia Tazartès, and beguiling works for Luke Younger’s Alter label. On their new album ‘Le Présent’ they typically keep everything ambiguously out-of-reach and etheric in forms comparable to experimental ambient musick, electro-acoustic minimalism, and outsider psych-folk, never fully tilting to any of them, preferring a style of shapeshifting that works beautifully well on the back of calm, shut eyelids.

Through a process of improvisation, active listening, and highly attuned intuition, Opéra Mort proceed to induce hypnotic states of mind that encourage the imagination to wander, following a labyrinthine breadcrumb trail of sonic artefacts and fine timbral detail. Their reticence to supply any explicit cues works to the benefit of suspending the listener’s disbelief, reserving the right to surprise and colour the mind with reeling tapestries of phantasmic, fathomless apparitions.

‘Le Monde’ first splashes on the senses with piquant arps and bass drones coaxed into a lush lather that’s pregnant with theatric dread, threaded with alien whispers on ‘Secrets’, and spangled with spring reverb in the eerily naif creep of ‘L’humanite entiere’. Their organic, fractally shifting collage of tape loops and synths in ‘Oeufs’ feels as though we’re combed backwards below the waves on a dreamlike shoreline, where they metamorphose into discordant, howling rave hoovers and caterwaul with ‘La nouvelle fin du mode’, and the deliquescent lounge music ooze of ‘Damien Schultz’, leaving us with no firm grasp of what the hell we’ve just been listening too, but totally enthralled nonetheless.

DJ Fusiller plumbs the depths of the french avant garde with a mad double tape of dream-woven collage and original material, where the binds of sur/reality get deeply frayed - a strong Riyl Luc Ferrari, Ghédalia Tazartès, Oï les Ox, ÉLG, Bzmc, Dominique Lawalrée

Sister in spirit and scope to the mind-bending mixtape ’Sacrilège Vénération Vol.1’ (2020), this ‘DJ Fusiller vs Fusiller’ double tape clasps the aspects of Jo Tanz’ practice as DJ and musician (with the likes of Reines D’Angleterre and Opéra Mort) in a properly mystifying session of psychedelic storytelling.

The session spreads across 66 minutes of enchanting, glued-together concrète ephemera and wigged-out original material that possesses similarly bewitching, bezzzzonkkkked qualities primed for intrepid listeners. They hail an unmistakeable sense of authority to his mixtapes while betraying a background steeped in the contemporary avant alongside fellow visionaries Ghédalia Tazartès & ÉLG, both carrying a torch of inspiration from classic french philosophy and mindsets that’s long expressed itself thru France’s interrelated, syncretised frameworks of art, literature, film, and music.

On the first tape "Les Prières Liquides" features Fusiller with 30 mins of original music flowing deep into the tenderised subconscious thru its matrix of synth textures and spangled electro-acoustic wizardry. In 10 parts he probes and torments finer integers of emotion, fleeting from horror score organ soused in salty noise to passages of bittersweet noise and rapid ear/eye movements that jog the memory’s nether regions in a persistent flux of wonder. We wager that a dose of your preferred HD goggles will enhance the effect, but are not necessary to get right inside the work, which keenly projects and imprints itself on the fantasy mindset.

The second tape is the 5th volume of DJ Fusiller’s french-music-only mixtape series, here deploying a reverie of allusive sonic signposts that act as an ideal counterpart for the album. Via avant cinematic jump cuts from field recordings to cosmic noise, mythologic alpine sirens and voice-in-your-head intimations, he conjures impossible leaps of the imagination that recall the poetry of Luc Ferrari as much as Trevor Duncan’s ‘La Jetée’ soundtrack in his beguiling, non-linear logic and lushly immersive scene-setting for what’s to come.

Brittany’s fabled Frenchtek rave scene is subject to a long overdue retrospective, spanning 10 frazzled hardcore techno oddities produced by key players Yann Dub & Explore Toi plus pals, made in the ‘90s and into the ’00s - Massive Riyl La Peste, Nomex, Praxis! The sound of choice for spangled refuseniks in north western France; Frenchcore is the hardcore techno subgenus notorious for soundtracking 100,000+ crowds at Teknivals - Europe’s answer to the UK’s free parties - as well as scuzzier, smaller raves in the region since the ‘90s. ‘Nation De La Boue’, or ‘Nation of Mud’, is among the first excavations for this pivotal era of contemporary French counterculture. Focussed on the work of two wayward players in the late, great Yann Dub and spar Explore Toi, their uncompromisingly weird and psychoactive rave music is held up as emblematic of French traditions of protestation and celebratory expression, and resonates heavily with Editions Gravats’ remit to highlight vital undercurrents of French music to the wider world. Yann de Kéroullas, pseudonymously known as Yann Dub, was a french sound engineer, founder of Reverse-Primecut mastering studio, and leading proponent of frenchtek’s weirdest sounds. He passed away in 2013, but not before driving myriad minds to delirium with his experimental strains of speedcore for long over a decade via his Reverse Records label. Yann’s work accounts for about half of ‘Nation De La Boue’ - a worthy posthumous testament to his wayward style, characterised by its raw concrète-mechanical textures and the kind of pelting kick drums that drive K’d out ravers to trample puddles in the mud. His wickedly unyielding ‘Untitled’ is a case in point, while ‘Bruit Blanc’ shares a more psychoactive sound design with his peer, La Peste, and the radioactive abstraction ‘Brest sa plage son port industrial et sa base atomique’ channels the region’s mix of rugged beauty and industry into pure noise grot. But if you want the full frontal experience, we’d advise downing a bucket of cheap red wine and rail a line of K the size of your middle finger before submitting to the 10 minutes of his ‘Untitled (Bonus)’ for optimal frenchtek effect. Explore Toi accounts for the other half of madness here. The wind-tunnel triplet coefficients of his ‘Kilos d’Huitres SVP Madame’ jam with Yann speaks to their shared, unhinged sidespin on hardcore techno, while the welting pulses of ‘Flamings Terminal’ gives a more personalised take on frenchtek standards, and the blasted 909 of his ‘Urban Groove’ follows a more psychedelic hunch to tonal paintings such as ‘Face Ambiance (Outro)’ and the monotonic structure of ‘Motherf#cker’s And Fatherf#cker’s (Bonus)’ that hail his background as a visual artist. ’Nation De La Boue’ renders a definitive cross-section of France’s alternative rave scene, one effectively light years away from more popularised strains of French touch filter house and electro-rock that paralleled the years covered inside. It’s an intriguing snapshot of a largely undocumented scene and a vitally unhinged - and largely forgotten - cog in the rave continuum.

Europe’s leading reggaeton experimenters DJ Clara! and Maoupa Mazzocchetti. exert a tripped-out spin on modern Latin dance and vintage Galician folk styles for Low Jack’s boundary-stepping club division of Editions Gravats. Following the duo’s 2018 debut EP and Clara!’s ‘Meiga de Acero’ single in 2019 for Les Disques De La Bretagne, ‘Luna Nueva’ binds the duo’s astrological, spiritual and romantic dancefloor cues in a significant new take on Caribbean futurism. Designed to make you sweat - and maybe check your head - the album pairs Clara!’s effortlessly nimble vocals with lean and spacious co-production by Maoupa Mazzocchetti in a way that faithfully and daringly plays with reggaeton convention, and, by extension, offers a critique of global electronic dance music currents.