*2025 stock* Suspiciously pitch-perfect soundtrack for a 2010 art exhibition and yet: composed, produced and miraculously released on vinyl by the artist himself. Each tune revolves around a musical scale, from a specific place (Romania, Japan, Central Africa) and reflects a miniature, island-like world, confined within the bare walls of an exhibition space in the early 21st Century. Spell-binding imaginary folk music.

French artist Julien Grossman has been creating (mostly) sound-adjacent art pieces for the past 20 years. It must have seemed a very sensible move to release an LP of music from his 2010 "Kokin (...) Slendro" sound installation, as the art pieces themselves were comprised of turntables and vinyls. Quite evidently, for whoever is familiar with visual artists' music releases (notoriously hard-to-find Fluxus-related music released via Dieter Roth's tiny labels, for instance), Julien Grossman's sole record was very badly distributed - through art bookshops and foundations's gift shops, mostly - never making it to the crates of the thriving record stores of the early 2010's (this probably explains, in part, why he only released one record, even if the record offers striking evidence of Grossman's musical talent).

Dense liner notes, written in an unsettling artspeak way, we, liner notes readers, are not familiar with, let us know that the tunes have been played on synthesized instruments. This comes as some surprise, regarding the strong analog feel of the record, and it turns out that the indistinct sounds and cracks have been red herrings making us believe in the materiality of these hard-to-identify instruments. All things considered, I wonder whether it's actually not the now-vintage sound of late 2000's Ableton and other music softwares possibly used by Grossmann that tricked us into thinking we're listening to live music.

However, it's most likely the very natural and rich arrangements that make us believe that this eerie brass band or that slightly out-of-tune steel guitar actually exist. Incidentally, it makes me think of 1980's Brazilian band Uakti, which members played Amazonian folk-inspired music on home-made instruments. Another teeming fantasy world, reminding of that of Eden Ahbez, profound and surreal, unearthed from a cheap bin on a grey day, somewhere in France. Numbered deadstock copies.