** 2LP, Gatefold cover ** Since their inception, the elusive Franco-Austro-British collective Pancrace has occupied a rarefied corner of the sonic avant-garde - fusing archaic technologies, handmade instruments, and collective intuition into sound worlds as confounding as they are captivating. With “Papotier” - their third and final installment for Penultimate Press and Cairos Edition - they complete a trilogy that began in a church in Dangolsheim and has since mapped out entirely new terrains of acoustic inquiry. Pancrace is Prune Bécheau, Arden Day, Julien Desailly, Léo Maurel, and Jan Vysocky. The origins of the group trace back to a 2015 residency in a rural church in southern France, where Maurel lived and maintained the historic pipe organ. This unique acoustic environment birthed their debut LP and defined the group’s signature approach - an ever-evolving conversation between space, instrument, and performer. Their music fuses hurdy-gurdy, modified bagpipes, viola da gamba, self-built contraptions, and prepared objects with a deep sensitivity to architectural resonance and unpredictable interaction.

“Papotier” finds the ensemble revisiting that foundational dialogue with pipe organ - this time via the legendary 18th-century Silbermann instrument in Bouxwiller, Alsace. At the heart of this recording lies a peculiar figure: the papotier, a grotesque carved mask embedded in the organ’s frame, its gaping mouth evoking speech, song, or perhaps a silent scream. This image becomes the central metaphor of the album - an inquiry into vocality, air, and the boundary between human and machine. Across four sides of vinyl, “Papotier” channels this impulse into a vast, surreal soundscape. The organ becomes a vocal tract. Instruments - uilleann pipes, baroque violin, the custom-built Organous, radios, toys, and bowing machines - murmur, wheeze, rattle, and interrupt. At times, the atmosphere is sparse and trembling; elsewhere it bursts into cacophonous revelry. Echoes of Aine O’Dwyer, David Tudor, or Luc Ferrari drift through the fog, only to vanish again into the collective’s singular logic.

Like its predecessors, “Papotier” is rooted in the physicality of sound and its responsive transformation through space. But here, Pancrace takes their approach further inward - not to refine, but to fracture. Language is not articulated but intuited; rhythm is not measured but stumbled upon. The result is something beyond music as we know it - part invocation, part hallucination. A culmination and a rupture, “Papotier” is the sound of a collective listening to itself dissolve, reassemble, and vanish again. Rarely does experimental music feel this alive, this strange, this essential. Issued in a very limited double LP edition - don’t sleep. These ghosts don’t linger long.