Jac Berrocal

Featuring: Jean-François Pauvros

condition (record/cover): VG+ (some surface noise) / VG+ (2" top seam split, innersleeve with seams split)

Tri-folded sleeve. With original innersleeve.

Released in 1979 as the third d'Avantage title, Catalogue is the most explicitly theatrical entry in Jac Berrocal's late-1970s sequence and arguably the strangest. Where Parallèles (1976) had felt like a long ritualised improvisation interrupted by song-forms, Catalogue is closer to a series of scenes, each piece a self-contained drama. Claude Parle's accordion shudders through "Rideau" like a parody of Portsmouth Sinfonia spoof-Dixieland; "No More Dirty Bla Blaps" is grungy free rock from a parallel-universe Pere Ubu; "Signe Particulier" is straight-up cold-wave Artaud-punk with Berrocal's trumpet wired into the song's panic circuitry.

The cast is generous: Jean-François Pauvros on guitar and bass, Jean-Pierre Arnoux on drums, Daniel Deshays on cello, the actor-presenters Georges Berrocal and Mohammed framing the action like a radio play. The whole album operates in the same Situationist twilight that Brigitte Fontaine and Areski had been exploring at Saravah a few years earlier, but with more punk wreckage and less chanson. Recorded the same year Steven Stapleton was beginning his Paris pilgrimages to discuss what would become a long collaboration, Catalogue sits at the hinge between French free improv and the post-punk industrial vocabulary.

The original vintage d'Avantage pressing on dav 03, never an easy find: the most extreme document from a label that operated for four years and produced only a handful of records. A document of post-1968 French underground music.