Jac Berrocal, David Fenech, Vincent Epplay HHV Records 2 Items

Jac Berrocal, David Fenech and Vincent Epplay are back with a true gem of an album: Transcodex. Turning more towards pop than in their beginnings, this fourth record follows the footsteps of their previous album, Exterior Lux. The trio seems limitless: they experiment with a large variety of styles (pop, dub, electronica, dark jazz), always colored by their very own touch. Jac Berrocal’s trumpet, richer than ever, plays over an ever-changing sonic landscape engineered by the duet of musicians/producers Vincent Epplay and David Fenech.

For this album, they invited two amazing musicians. Jah Wobble (founding member of Public Image Ltd and collaborator of African Head Charge, Brian Eno, Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, Evan Parker, Sinéad O'Connor) plays deep bass lines on two tracks. Jean-Hervé Peron (founding member of the German band Faust, and who recorded with Tony Conrad, Nurse With Wound, Pascal Comelade) brings his prowess to two tracks as well. Peron writes lyrics in French, German and Russian — and plays the French Horn like no one else.

The closing track of the A side is a tribute to Christophe Bevilacqua (1945-2020), friend to Jac Berrocal. The song summons the place Bevilacqua used to live in: an Art Deco flat on Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris.

Even if its intentions are clear, Transcodex does not reveal all its secrets right away. It’s up to you to find the solution, the key, the Transcodex yourself. It must be revisited over and over again for its beauty to be fully revealed.

Jac Berrocal is a 1946-born musician (trumpet player), poet and sometime film actor who came of age in the ‘70s Paris improv scene, where the boundaries between music, art and theatre were porous and begging to be breached. Inspired by bebop, chanson, free jazz, beat poetry, early rock ‘n roll and myriad Eastern influences, and with an iconoclastic, anything-goes approach to instrumentation and technique that would later align him with post-punk sensibilities, Berrocal blazed an eccentric and unstoppable trail across the underground throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, both solo and as part of the Catalogue group he co-founded. During this time his uproarious performances routinely wound up jazz and rock audiences alike, but earned the admiration of many musicians: Steven Stapleton invited him to perform on two Nurse With Wound albums, and other notable collaborators in his career include Sunny Murray, Lizzy Mercier-Descloux, Lol Coxhill, Yvette Horner and James Chance. In the 90s his protean achievements were celebrated on the Fatal Encounters compilation, but far from slowing down in the autumn of his life, Berrocal has maintained an extraordinary work-rate, keeping studio dates with Pascal Comelade, Telectu and Jaki Liebezeit, among others.

Now Berrocal has found the perfect foil in David Fenech and Vincent Epplay, two fearlessly inventive improvisers, composers and catalysts who create challenging, acutely modernist yet historically aware settings – wrought out of synthesis, guitars, computer processing, field recordings and unorthodox percussions – for Berrocal’s unmistakeable voice and breathtakingly lyrical horn sound to flourish.

Fenech cut his teeth in the mail-art scene of the early ‘90s, leading the Peu Importe collective in Grenoble. His 2000 solo debut was recently reissued by Felix Kubin’s Gagarin label, and he has also worked as a software developer at Ircam, and played with Jad Fair, Tom Cora, Rhys Chatham and James Plotkin; in 2011 he formed a trio with Berrocal and Ghedalia Tazartes for the Superdisque LP.

Epplay is a highly regarded sonic and visual artist with a particular interest in aleatory composition and autonomous pieces, concrète, and the puckish reappropriation of vintage sound and film material, with dozens of published works to his name on labels like Planam/Alga Marghen and PPT/Stembogen. Exterior Lux is the third part in the series of albums and was again mastered by the legendary Noel Summerville.

"It’s like The Bonzo Dog Band meeting Scott Walker, with Codona booked for the interval music" (Brian Morton - The Wire)

"Jazz, Dub, Musique concrete and a Gallic punk spirit, coalesce into a sound so potent it is a wonder it hasn’t been done before" (Rewind Forward)

"An eclectic mix of folk anarchy, West Coast jazz cool, African kalimba, French poetry and studio dub. All the beauty and terror of jazz at its most lawless." (Andrew Male - Mojo)