"Costes has caused me so much trouble. Even today, 25 years after the last time I performed with him, I still have a hard time booking shows because he has not mellowed as I have and the venues are afraid, because of my past association with him, that there will be piss, shit, violence, genitalia, racial tension, cops, etc. Costes has caused himself so much trouble. He's been taken to court five times over his art, received countless death threats. When's the last time you can think of that ART has been taken so seriously - ¦ as a life and death matter? And he perseveres. I think Costes is extraordinary. He ostentatiously thumbs not only his nose, but every single body part external AND internal, at any authority there is. Pas Encore Mort, a re-release of a 1997 CD, is uncharacteristically introspective, pretty, and sad. It is unsettling to see the man behind the gross warrior exposed, vulnerable, alone. I love and hate this album." Lisa Carver - Maine, U.S. 2 April 2016.
Born in 1954, Jean-Louis Costes is possibly France's most transgressive and independent artist. He is a musician, singer/songwriter, performance artist, painter, writer, actor and director. His highly expressionist trash style is instantly recognizable no matter which mode of expression he adopts. A unique and uncompromising artist, Costes has released over 70 albums since 1986.
His songs are mostly recorded in his home studio and display very raw explicit lyrics, with music alternating between rock, pop and noise. He is renowned for his infamous 'Porno-Social' Operas, which can be described as an explosive mix of live music, theater, violent actions, sex, noise, chansons, romanticism, mysticism and social issues.
He has toured Europe, North America and Japan. In the late 1990s, he began publishing his own texts, and since 2003, has authored four novels.
Tracklisting: Side A: 1. Pas Encore Mort 2. La Drogue, La Mort, La Nuit 3. Mourons Ensemble 4. La Seule Solution
Side B: 1. Crever Tout Seul 2. Amour Eternel 3. Rien à Ajouter 4. La Dernière Chanson
Debut LP by the new creepy and romantic basement organ project of Romain Perrot (VOMIR, FREE AS DEAD, FALOT, RORO PERROT).
'The other night I dreamt about a parallel universe in which Klaus Schulze had some sort of government-paid job installing contact mics and analog synths (which I suspect was mainly to annoy Tangerine Dream) in all the big European cathedrals to "modernize" the pipe organs.
I told him how they used to make cobwebs in the early Dracula movies; you punch a small hole in a yogurt pot full of liquid latex attached to an electric drill, point roughly where you want the cobwebs to go, shut your eyes and hit the trigger. This got ol' Klaus drooling, and pretty soon every church (not to mention cemetery) ceiling in France was dripping with stringy latex goo.
He also decided to add more gargoyles (inside, on the altar) and impose a black metal warpaint dress code for Sunday mass. Roro worked part-time as the Hunchback (every church had their own, so as well as Notre Dame there was The Hunchback of The Sistine Chapel, The Hunchback of Unarius, and even, controversially, The Hunchback of Scientology) and also hung out in front of Pere Lachaise trying to get people to sign a petition to change the name of the cemetery to "The Dario Argento Museum".
Reclusiveness aside, Romain and I sometimes like to meet up near Notre Dame at a Japanese restaurant run by one of the members of Les Legions Noire, serving "necro-sushi" and so on... One sunny afternoon, sighing as he removed the fake Quasimodo teeth and the cushion stuffed into the back of his shirt, he handed me the new Trou Au Rats LP, cursing the backache which was the result of his job. "Give this to Klaus" he said, in a deep voice a few octaves lower than usual.
Now, dear reader, let me assure you, I don't know and I don't want to know what kind of entities he'd done deals with in his basement catacomb, but a few days after Klaus heard that album, Roro got to lay down his hunch for the last time, and scored his dream job as full-time organist. Mind you, dream job or not, he does still have to wear the plastic vampire fangs, somehow managing to remain the perfect gentleman, even if they do make him talk funny.
Now, if you are aware of his other projects (Vomir being one), chez Roro there's no such thing as a coincidence, and there's always a lot more going on that meets the eye...
That might explain why, shortly after his promotion to organist, as if by majic(k), weird record shops called things like "Bimbo Tower 2" started opening up all over Europe in the tiny streets round the backs of cathedrals or near to old cemeteries (and even inside pyramids, or so I was told), right next to where the crazy old witches sell gory upside-down crucifixion dioramas and Free As Dead t-shirts in the most happenin' European cities. Which must be why you are reading this right now' Andy Bolus (Evil Moisture, Royal Sperm) Paris January 2018
Collaboration piece between two major players in the contemporary Italian electro-acoustic music scene.
Alberto Boccardi has studied composition and music theory at Milan's Music Civic Academy and has frequently collaborated with Lawrence English, Nicola Ratti, or Maurizio Abate among others while Stefano Pilia is a prolific guitarist and electro-acoustic theorist with a massive body of work and compositions. He has collaborated with Mike Watt, Nico Vascellari, David Tibet or Valerio Tricoli to name a few.
I love this new album "bastet" by alberto boccardi and stefano pilia right from my first listen I decided I would go to the sea (my pedro town is in the harbor of los angeles) to write my thoughts about it cuz the sea is what I first thought of when I heard the first sounds of it coming - I figured it was the sea cuz I had feelings from the music I had these sensations cuz I felt I was in the ocean - on a boat... actually not just on a boat but in the bottom of it - down in the bilge. The musical interaction between alberto and stefano is seamless and whole, free of potentially encumbering static structures, I'm drawn into the pitch and yaw, the port and starboard, the heave and ho.
The piece is made of two parts ("bastet" and "dayira") w/each of those parts being made of likewise two parts. the longes of these bookend the shorter ones but still it is a journey. by the middle I feel lower in the bowels of the boat and in fact, this boat is now feeling like a submarine and so not only am I deep down up in the vessel itself, the world I feel around in is ALSO deep down in it, deep down beneath the waves and so I feel the pushing of currents, the pressure of the depths compressing the bulkheads.
On the very bottom of the hull's inside, over the keel I place my head so the vibrations can pass right the bone of my skull. the last part of the voyage for me is a surprise cuz now the sub feels more like a train. we're still moving but everything is no longer wet and there are many gifts falling into my eyes and I survey the passing landscapes.
The mechanized sounds throughout the piece by now only confirm my suspicion they were only coincidences of chance and not purpose-built reels of barbed-wire to enforce fake borders. maybe this "railroad" in my head actually was the sea becoming a river and I got confused. whatever, alberto and stefano created and preformed a whole and beautiful work that I feel we are very lucky to get to share w/them. music connected by imagination to let the spirit flow true. no wonder I read somewhere the cat-headed old egypt deity of bast was considered the guardian of the dream world.
I am inspired. grazie, fratelli. mike watt san pedro, california january 2018 The sounding worlds of Boccardi and Pilia meet in quasi-narrative paths. Immediately, from the first glance at the tracklist, something seems to thematize the encounter in its two-faced nature: two dedications (Bastet and Dayira, the birth), each one in two parts, but also an encounter between electric guitar and percussions. The guitar being itself already an encounter between acoustic and electric sounds. Yet again, organic and electronic soundscapes are coupled down into introspection and vision.
While Bastet is set to follow an inner voyage along memories and ambiences where Popol Vuh and Robert Rich seem to faintly appear, it is Dayira that is given the mission of projecting the inner vision into vast emotional landscapes. And at the very end something new is birthed, a minor chord that apparently has nothing to do with the drones and patterns preceding it, along the sound of the entire album. An intriguing surprise that is driven by an electronic, floating aura to a quasi-interrupted ending. Functioning as a promise that this voyage has yet to be finished. Massimilano Viel Milano, Italy January 2018
Tracklisting: 1. Bastet Pt I 2. Bastet Pt II 3. Dayira Pt I 4. Dayira Pt II
The continuation of the audio trilogy concerning the Darkness of Aegypt: the shadow stuff from whence dark dreams come. The Triad: dark, light and the animating serpent power are delineated by the Egyptian Gods Set, Horus and the Apep serpent.
The second parting of the ways, lord of the crossroads, the double horizon, the xroads of day and night, the mauve zone, the death posture. We brought back: a twilight mechanism, and hymns to the charnel ground, ashes, jackals and the bulto hyaena, pacing the departure lounges of abandoned airports.
Matthew Bower & Samantha Davies West Yorks, UK Winter Solstice Evening 2017.
Tracklisting: Side A: 1. We move on points of shattered mirrors
What is Normal Music?' That was the title I chose for an article some years ago and despite the fact that I was searching something else, it was difficult to find anything better to start these lines about 'Horizon Capiton'; the new LP by French musician Olivier Brisson.
Monsieur Brisson lives in Lille and has been involved not only with sound experimentation but also with psychiatry. The latter is not just a detail but an important fact here: this is a work about frames and boundaries. But who (or what) are inside/outside those frames? That's not easy to say.
The sound collage brings us to a continuous flow where everything seems mixed: 'professionals' cataloguing 'mental illness', voices of 'patients', tape failures, suggestive music passages, anomalous noises, field recordings from everywhere and several rivers of sounds sailing together along with the listener.
The trip is intense and compelling. Beautiful and terrifying. The horizon might be a cushion but it might be also something else. We're culturally trained to believe that something is 'normal' or not and we put a lot of effort in trying to make the world fit in those categories. But in the end who is 'normal' enough to say what is 'not normal'?
This is what this record is about and Beware! Sound can easily brake barriers, even those you didn't notice were present. Anla Courtis Buenos Aires, Argentina December 2017.