We use cookies on our website to provide you with the best experience. Most of these are essential and already present.
We do require your explicit consent to save your cart and browsing history between visits. Read about cookies we use here.
Your cart and preferences will not be saved if you leave the site.
play
Out of stock

Sophie Agnel, Daunik Lazro, Olivier Benoit

Gargorium (LP)

Label: Fou Records

Format: LP

Genre: Experimental

Out of stock

A Fou Records production, like a large part of the music of its producer, Jean-Marc Foussat, is a bit of a puzzle.

"The title, which borrows from the world of video games - Gargorium - resonates with the image on the cover of a vinyl record - one of its generosity. In the foreground, against the backdrop of a wall overgrown with ivy and a floor strewn with the feathery foliage of a thuja, she places a figurine of the famous stryge of Notre-Dame. His gaze is doubly displaced in terms of space, from the city to the countryside - one assumes -, from the bell tower to the ground, and fourfold in terms of time: a sculpture imagined in the 19th century to bring a fantasised Middle Ages up to date, which becomes iconic in the 20th century and ends up giving, in the 21st, a virtual body to a virtual reality character - the famous Gargorium. His look remains evil.

I hope you won't mind if, under these conditions, I just go back forty years to find in these four tracks a sort of direct posterity to a music whose future could be questioned at the time, that of the ephemeral Music Improvisation Company, and more precisely the track that opens his eponymous album, Third stream boogaloo, a title that, in turn, humorously sums up many displacements. It is answered here by Migrating motor complex, as if to confirm the idea that something is going on while barely transposing itself: there is nothing really drawing in these claps of tubing, these scrapings, squeaks, scrapings, these crumbling sounds, with metallic resonances, these dull rollings on a gravel path in the undecidable glow of milky dawn, of suspended twilight. A voice, however, stands out, monotonous, on a half-erased line that indicates the track, the rail, where a stalker's draisine - let's say - bumps. And it slowly moves away into the fog where the sound gradually fades away.

Informed ears will give each one its balls and springs, its minor zinc work, its stirring of the toolbox where one rummages, fiddles, stirs and fiddles, from which a voice is extracted, often late in the day, from prolonged whistling, from vagrancy to gagged screams. The machine is nonetheless on the rails, and if it is not in command, this voice, more worried than settled, lets itself be carried haphazardly towards a destination that it does not know and that we will not discover. A passage, but one which, as a sign of the times, does not even promise the end of a Zone where one would be sent back to a faith of rescue. In what way, it is well and truly of today." - Philippe Alen

Details
Cat. number: FR-LP 09
Year: 2023

More by Sophie Agnel, Daunik Lazro, Olivier Benoit