Clair Obscur

Founded in Creil, in the Oise département north of Paris, in 1981 by Thierry Damerval on bass and keyboards, Christophe Demarthe on vocals, and Nicolas Demarthe on guitar, Clair Obscur are widely credited with coining the term cold wave, which makes it all the more striking that they vehemently refused to be categorised as gothic or wave, insisting on their own radical unclassifiability from the beginning. Their early shows mixed music with performance art; one notorious concert was staged as a mock television game show. They played Le Cirque d'Hiver in Paris in 1982 and the Wiener Festwochen in 1991; they appeared on the New European Recordings compilation From Torture to Conscience alongside Current 93, Death in June, and In The Nursery; they released records on All the Madmen and Cathexis. The French press called it "Rock Artaud — théâtre de la cruauté."

This deluxe CD box (C.O.I.T. A Collection of Isolated Tracks 1981–1988, VODCD6) is the most comprehensive document of the group's first decade, collecting 28 tracks from singles, compilations, and previously unreleased sources, plus the first-ever vinyl edition of their 1982 tape La Cassette Noire, housed in a black varnished wooden box with six metallic offset-printed postcards and a 7". The music moves from spiky, rudimentary coldwave and synthpop in 1981–82 through darkly muscular EBM-inflected territory in 1983, gothic atmospheres in 1983–84, and lean industrial dance in the later years, a full arc of one of France's most singular bands. Edition of 300 double CDs.