Xalph

The story begins in the city of Bordeaux in 1964. Captivated by Hank Marvin's guitar-playing, Jean Pierre Daran teaches himself to play Shadows tunes, working out their intricacies by the unusual method of slowing 45RPM singles down to 33RPM. Jean Pierre joins forces with Yvan Blanl?il, Jean Jacques Pouget, and Serge Blachère to form the band Les Franglais. In 1971, a new musical project takes shape when Jean Pierre and Yvan form Lucie Dans le Ciel with three other students: Francis Ferrer, Christian Lassalle, and André Lesgouarres. The music is influenced by '60s beat and Frank Zappa's freakiness. After playing some local gigs, Lucie Dans le Ciel score the support for Magma, when they went through Bordeaux in April '72. At that show, Christian Vander and his band were won over by the madness of the Bordelais musicians, who closed their set with a big battle of cream pie. A friendship grows, and contact is established between Magma's professional musicians and the Bordeaux amateurs. However, Yvan Blanloeil is now more excited by theatre than by music, and he quickly sucks the life out of Lucie Dans le Ciel by wanting to restrict it to providing musical accompaniment to theater shows. The other musicians, no longer feeling that they are expressing themselves, don't hide their dissatisfaction. Yvan continued his theater career alone. In the meantime the musicians around Jean Pierre Daran formed a new group: Amélie la Sèche. As none of the musicians can read music, everything is worked out through discussion; the strong sense of unity this creates yields a number of highly-collaborative musical sketches recorded on a Teac 3300 reel-to-reel recorder. On these recordings Jean Pierre creates his own universe on the guitar, and Christian Lassalle, Francis Ferrer, André Lesgouarres, and new bass-player Jean Pierre Alcaïne add their own contributions. After clarinetist and saxophonist Christian Faure joins, Amélie la Sèche play a number of concerts, but never outside the Bordeaux area. The band's most creative period begins in July '74, while the group (now renamed Xalph) is rehearsing in a house in Pondaurat, a small village in the Gironde. Recordings of accomplished pieces of "dense music full of rhythmic and harmonic twists and turns" are made by the group, with the bass overdubbed onto a reel-to-reel Sony and the ever-present Teac 3300. Clear vinyl; Includes poster and insert; Edition of 1000 (numbered).