Once again diving into the under-explored world of musical "art brut" via the incredible previously unreleased catalog of the French visionary artist Jean-Marie Massou, La Belle Brute returns with “Sodorome Vol.III: Les Romans De Massou”, their fourth release dedicated to Massou, which delves into his "novels", a series of sound fictions, created over the last two decades of his life, intertwining striking narratives via spoken text accompanied by collages of sound effects, music, and ambient sounds.

While accepted in the context of visual art, the term "art brut" has very little precedent within music. Coined during the 1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of “official” culture, the designation has generally been applied to creative output of self-taught individuals who lack formal training within the arts and who tend to have little or no contact with the conventions of the art world. Simply left to this framework alone, nearly all musical folk traditions from around the globe, as well as a great many forms of popular music could be regarded as "art brut”. This makes it necessary to create a more specific sense of definition that incorporates the notion of a socio-cultural “outsider”, the outcomes of economic disadvantage, and often certain life affecting challenges experienced by the artist, that are harnessed into visionary bodies of creative expression that stand entirely on their own. To this end, for the better part of the last decade, the imprint La Belle Brute has offered an unprecedented dedication to the work and legacy of the French artist, Jean-Marie Massou, who worked in bare solitude in the forest of Marminiac for more than 45 years until his passing in 2020, creating, among numerous other gestures, a sprawling canon of audio works that mixed field recordings, laments, and messages to humanity, created privately on cassette recorders.

Between 1973 and his passing at the age of 70 in 2020, Jean-Marie Massou lived in isolation at the heart of the Marminiac forest in the Lot region of France. Having been initially brought there by his mother as an alternative to having her severely mentally ill and illiterate son institutionalized, Massou found solace within groves of chestnut trees, creating an expansive world within and around himself, digging countless underground galleries, unearthing gigantic stones that he shifted, erected, aligned, piled up, engraved, as well as recording hundreds of cassettes that captured his laments, stories, dreams, speeches about the end of the world, ecological disaster, and the arrival of extraterrestrials.

Having encountered this remarkable body of work and recognising the need for it to be accessible to a broad audience, the collective La Belle Brute was established with the objective of releasing Massou’s first musical opus: “Sodorome Volume I” (2016), which encompassed an overview of his various sound practices. In 2018, they published a second volume, “La Citerne de Coulanges”, drawn from a cassette made during the 1970s by the artist of himself singing and accompanying himself with stone strikes on the wall of a cistern.

The release of the third volume in the series, “Sodorome Vol.III: Les Romans De Massou”, was the last to be initiated by the imprint with Massou before his passing in 2020. The project, conceived by the artist sometime around the year 2000, as well as the subsequent album that bears its name, comprises a series of sound fictions: the telling of a story accompanied with sound effects, music, and ambient sounds, sculpted into montages soundtracks, often made by working simultaneously on three tape recorders - some playing, others recording - with audio material gathered from the radio and his surrounding environment. The resulting works were referred to by Massou as his “novels”.

“Sodorome Vol.III: Les Romans De Massou” gathers three of Massou’s “novels”: “Le repenti des prostituées”, “Mort en pêche”, and “Le retour à Rubelles”, the first of which was played by Massou for La Belle Brute prior to his death, with the second two, laying amongst hundreds of hours of tapes that still await listening, having been discovered since. Remarkably visionary and intuitively connected to the avant-garde tradition of musique concrète, each of Massou’s “novels” is a wild and immersive blast of sonority, so compelling and unique in their raw materiality and structure that even without an understanding of French, their depths and complexity - dancing amongst fragments of found sound and vocal utterances - can’t help but captivate the heart and mind.

Unlike anything else we’re likely to encounter this year, Jean-Marie Massou’s “Sodorome Vol.III: Les Romans De Massou” is an absolute treasure trove of singular creative sonority that takes great steps toward expanding access to this remarkable and undercelebrated artist, as well as further clarify the terms and definition of musical "art brut”.