Pierre Schaeffer, Claude Arrieu

condition (discs/box/book): NM / NM / NM - 232-page book included. La Coquille À Planètes on Disques Adès pushes the Pierre Schaeffer and Claude Arrieu partnership into outright science fiction. Subtitled "Suite Fantastique Pour Une Voix Et Douze Monstres En Huit Emissions Radiophoniques," it's radio drama as hallucination, a voyage through imaginary cosmos rendered in pre-synthesizer electronics and transformed voices. The "twelve monsters" aren't metaphorical: they're sonic creatures, each with distinct physiognomy, conjured through tape manipulation techniques that wouldn't become common vocabulary until the psychedelic era.

There's something of Raymond Scott's mad-scientist energy here, crossed with the surrealist theater of Antonin Artaud. Schaeffer and Arrieu understood that radio's invisibility was a liberation: freed from visual representation, sound could become genuinely monstrous, unconstrained by what cameras could capture or stages could contain. The imagination faced no budget limits.

This lavish 4CD-plus-book reissue treats the material with the seriousness it deserves. Because make no mistake: this is founding text, proof that electroacoustic music was never merely abstract, never divorced from narrative, dream, terror. The avant-garde's supposed coldness is a myth propagated by people who never heard these broadcasts crackling through 1940s speakers, never felt the frisson of monsters emerging from the family radio.