Association P.C., Pierre Courbois

LP version. Earwax is the debut album of Association P.C., the group drummer Pierre Courbois formed in 1969, and it was recorded at the Middelhorst studio in Wageningen at the end of October 1970. Born in Nijmegen in 1940, Courbois had worked in Paris in the early sixties with musicians such as Kenny Drew and Eric Dolphy. He led the Free Jazz Quartet from 1961 and played on Gunter Hampel's Heartplants in 1965. With Association he carried that free vocabulary into amplified territory. This first record, issued by the small Dutch label Munich Records, catches European free jazz at the moment it began to borrow the volume and pulse of rock. The original gatefold carried liner notes by Maarten Derksen and the motto "watch out because nothing will stop association", with the sides marked Voorkant and Achterkant.

The line-up is Toto Blanke on guitar, Jasper van 't Hof on electric piano, Sigi Busch and Peter Krijnen sharing the bass parts and Courbois at the kit. Wim Wigt produced the session and Dick van Schuppen engineered it, and the two sides were taped on consecutive days. The album opens with Spider, but side one belongs to the eleven minutes of Hit The P. Tit. Here Blanke's fuzz-toned guitar runs over a fast, restless rhythm section while van 't Hof's electric piano chords cut across the groove. Elsen follows as a miniature of barely a minute and a half. The title track opens side two and sits closer to electrified late-sixties jazz, before the more open Round A'bout and the short Jazzper. Van 't Hof soon left and Joachim Kühn took the keyboard chair. The group then recorded four albums for MPS, from Sun Rotation in 1972 to Mama Kuku in 1974, and broke up in 1975. Earwax stayed a rare Dutch pressing for decades, reissued only on a Japanese CD in 2021.

This Music On Vinyl edition (MOVLP3918) is pressed on 180 gram vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, the first time the album has appeared on vinyl since the original 1970 pressing.