Pascal Comelade

My Degeneration: Electronics 1974-1983 opens a secret chapter in the story of Pascal Comelade, rewinding to a decade when his music lived inside wires, oscillators and tape heads rather than toy pianos and mutant folk ensembles. Spanning material recorded between 1974 and 1983, this expansive box set gathers his earliest explorations with synthesizers, organs and primitive studio gear, revealing a body of work that feels at once of its time and strangely out of time. Long before his name became synonymous with miniature hymns and Mediterranean surrealism, Comelade was alone with machines, working through the possibilities of electronics in a way that paralleled, but never simply imitated, the German kosmische scene, early industrial and the more wayward fringes of French experimental music.

The recordings collected here trace an artist teaching himself to speak through circuitry. You can hear the trial‑and‑error in the way pieces veer from glacial drones and slow‑unfolding arpeggios to jagged rhythmic studies and near‑static tone‑poems that hover just above silence. Minimal motifs repeat until they begin to disintegrate, tape saturation blurs the edges of simple patterns into hallucinatory smears, and drum machines stumble in awkward, compelling loops that feel closer to sketches for imaginary machines than to conventional “tracks.” At times the music suggests private homages to Tangerine Dream, Heldon or Cluster; at others, its combination of naivety, grit and conceptual clarity points toward the post‑punk and industrial undergrounds that were emerging in parallel.

What makes My Degeneration so compelling is the sense of a personality slowly coming into focus behind the gear. Even at his most ascetic, Comelade allows fragments of melody to surface - small, stubborn phrases that refuse to be swallowed by the surrounding noise. There is a tension between austere electronic process and an almost pop‑like instinct for hooks, even when those hooks are smothered in echo or buried under pulse tones and filtered hiss. This push‑and‑pull becomes a through‑line across the set: each piece feels like a negotiation between the seductive order promised by sequencers and the messy, human urge to deform, detune and derail them.